Black Vote Rising, Black Power Diminishing, Black Condition Worsening

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

“If Black voting strength actually translates as real power, then why is the Black condition deteriorating, even as Black electoral activity increases?”

A U.S. Census report on voter turnout shows Blacks voted at higher rates than whites in the 2012 election – the first time that’s happened since records have been kept, according to Census Bureau officials. Another study indicates African Americans also turned out in proportionately greater numbers than whites in 2008, to elect Barack Obama the first time.

What is the import of the relatively massive Black voter turnout in the last two presidential elections? First, we should note that African Americans were at least as enthusiastic about voting almost a century and a half ago, during Reconstruction.

The historical record indicates that Blacks flocked to the polls in huge numbers after Emancipation in those regions where they were not held back by white terrorists. In some states, Blacks made up the clear majority of voters, with some classes of ex-Confederates barred from the polls while other whites boycotted the process. Once federal troops were withdrawn from the South, in 1877, Reconstruction was systematically dismantled. However, during this brief period of intense Black electoral activity, Reconstruction governments delivered substantial citizenship goods, including establishing the first public schools in the South.

The newly freed slaves knew full well what they were voting for: a transformation of society; an end to white supremacy; the rule of law, not of one race over another; the right not only to all the services that government provided, but to social goods, such as a public education, that southern governments had not previously provided, even to whites.

“In virtually every category of well-being, the Black condition is worsening in comparison to whites.”

One hundred years after the Civil War, the masses of southern Blacks were re-enfranchised, and African Americans became majorities or strong pluralities in many of the nation’s cities. In 2008, they got a chance to vote for a Black man at the top of a major party ticket. Black enthusiasm for voting returned. But, what has been the return in terms of social goods? In virtually every category of well-being, the Black condition is worsening in comparison to whites. The bottom has fallen out of the Black economy, with household wealth shrinking to nonexistence except for a slim sliver of the Black population. African Americans make up one out of every eight of the planet’s prison inmates, their communities enveloped by an ever-tightening police state.

If Black voting strength actually translates as real power, then why is the Black condition deteriorating, even as Black electoral activity increases? Part of the answer is internal to Black America. A portion of the African American population has for the past 40 years hitched its fortunes to corporate boardrooms. Unfortunately, this selfish element also comprises most of Black leadership. This Black Misleadership Class barters Black votes in exchange for its own upward mobility. They have made a pact with the rich, who abhor the very concepts of democracy and human equality. The mission of the Black Misleadership Class is to strip Black politics of all socially transformative content so that, no matter how large the Black voter turnout, real power remains in corporate hands.

Political power is not something you add up on a scoreboard every four years; it is people pulling together to create a just society, by any means necessary. Increased Black voting levels indicate only that Blacks are interested in gaining power – not that they are wielding it.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Radicalized = Weaponized = Kill at Will

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

“The line between political beliefs and illegal action is eradicated, so that the ‘radicalized’ person or group is inherently deserving of liquidation.”

Like all advanced police states, the U.S. national security regime has begun speaking its own, degenerate language. It is a mode of speech that simultaneously defines the “enemy” and justifies his or her destruction. The soulless, bureaucratic roots of National Security Speech belie the ruthless intent, which is to make the utter destruction of the targeted group or individual appear to be the natural order of things.

“Self-radicalization” is one of the terms coined by national security speakers. To people like President Obama, a guy who adds targets to his Kill List every Tuesday, “self-radicalization” represents a grave threat to the American state. “One of the dangers that we now face,” said Obama, in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, “are self-radicalized individuals who are already in the United States,” because it is difficult to prevent them from carrying out “plots.”

In this context, it is clear that to “radicalize” means very much the same as to “weaponize”; the radicalized person has been transformed into a weapon. A radical is no longer simply an individual “who advocates thorough or complete political or social reform,” but someone who by their very thought processes represents a clear and present danger to the United States. The line between political beliefs and illegal action is eradicated, so that the “radicalized” person or group is inherently deserving of liquidation. The operative word is “radical.”

Obama is not talking about “Manchurian Candidates” who have been programmed against their will and without their knowledge to carry out acts dictated by others. He’s talking about people who quite consciously object to U.S. policies, who might do something about it at some time in the future, or influence others’ opinions about the United States. Obama’s problem with the people he calls “self-radicalized” is that they cannot be easily entrapped or shown to be guilty by association with others who think as they do – and if they do act, their actions do not necessarily implicate others. For the fascist-minded, this must be quite frustrating.

“Assata remains radical.”

Assata Shakur was radicalized at least 45 years ago. An all-white jury convicted her of killing a New Jersey policeman. She escaped from prison, and has been under the protection of the Cuban government for the last 29 years, a political exile. The cop has been dead since 1973, Shakur’s political party has long been defunct, and she is a grandmother far from home. But the FBI felt compelled to double the one million dollar reward for Shakur, and to elevate her to number one domestic terrorist. Why? Because Shakur continues to “maintain and promote her…ideology" and "provides anti-U.S. government speeches espousing the Black Liberation Army message.” That is, she remains radical, and therefore, a weapon, even at the age of 65, isolated from her 40 million fellow African Americans, few of whom know her name. But the FBI pretends to fear that her “ideology” might go viral at any time.

They don’t believe that, of course. The political police are simply determined to make radicalism – of the “self” or group inspired variety – synonymous with criminality, much in the way that “Black” is now inextricably linked with crime in the public mind. According to that formula, a Black woman radical makes the perfect poster for a political witch hunt.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

From Race Men to Debased Men, Obama at Morehouse, Arne Duncan at Morgan State

A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

A good friend in Atlanta observed that when President Bush used to visit, his inbox would be flooded with alerts and notices about vigils, picket lines and demonstrations. But when the current president comes to town, there's nothing.

President Obama will punctuate the commencement at Atlanta's Morehouse College next week. The only ripple that's made news is whether some preacher who criticized the president for not making enough black appointments to elite high offices should be allowed to set foot on campus that weekend. Commencement week, Morehouse officials solemnly say, is about the graduates, not politics.

At Morgan State University, another historically black institution of higher learning in Baltimore, Obama's basketball buddy and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is scheduled to deliver the commencement address. There's not much publicly visible dissent behind that either, despite the fact that President Obama's Race To The Top program has closed and privatized more public schools than any other president in US history, and Arne Duncan chucks that spear. Baltimore is reportedly closing 32 schools in the near future while building only 15 new ones. One wonders whether Baltimore and Morgan State would be protesting if the same destructive policies were forced upon them by a white president without the soothing presence of a compliant black political elite as intermediaries.

There's no shortage of of pressing issues at Morgan State, Maryland state delegate Jill P. Carter informed Black Agenda Report. The school is suing the state of Maryland and its Democrat governor, charging that the state's historically black colleges and universities have been chronically underfunded. According to Carter, HBCUs across the country are watching and waiting to file similar suits if this one succeeds.

“There's no shortage of bright, successful HBCU alumni who could deliver powerful, inspiring commencement address,” said Carter. “It's too bad Morgan State didn't go there instead.”

Delegate Carter has a point. It is too bad. What it's not is the least bit surprising.

The leaders of Morgan State University, of Morehouse College and many similar institutions are not really leaders at all, not the way the old style “race men” and women supposed themselves to be once upon a time, standing up and lifting up all our people. They are followers, members of a black misleadership class which values conformity, silence and careers over courageous advocacy and struggle, and prizes individual enrichment over investment in a community's collective wealth and power.

The race men have become debased men, unable even to stand up for the interests of their own institutions, let alone for public education, or against gentrification, or the interests of African Americans as a whole. Commencement addresses for them are not about inspiring the graduates about to go forth into the world and accomplish things about which their elders can only dream. They're about genuflecting to power and repeating the stale old narratives that validate and justify our class of elite black misleaders.

For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via this site's contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

Defend Assata, Defend Ourselves: The Black Is Black Coalition Rallies in Harlem

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

“Obama is serving notice that those who share Assata’s ideology – as understood by the FBI – are subject to eradication as well.”

In doubling the bounty on former Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur’s head, the Obama administration is announcing that Black radicals are candidates for his Kill List. The message is as unmistakable and dramatic as the billboards that have been erected in Newark, New Jersey, and elsewhere screaming for the exiled freedom fighter’s blood.

One does not wind up on the FBI’s Most Wanted list based on the number of murders committed or millions of dollars stolen. The Most Wanted list is among the nation’s most political documents, in which individuals are meant to personify the scope and type of offenses that the U.S. government considers most in need of stamping out. The list is a kind of propaganda, a symbolic display of what the state considers dangerous behavior.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, the two Black men who are most responsible for making Assata Shakur the face of domestic terror in the United States, are fully conversant in the language of symbolism. They are publicly defining the Black liberation movement – or what’s left of it, or those who might attempt to revive it – as a priority domestic target for repression. Shakur, a 65-year old grandmother who has not left Cuba for the past 29 years, poses no physical danger to the American state. She represents a political threat, through her “ideology,” as brazenly stated by the FBI. The Bureau has marked Shakur for priority assassination on the basis of, in the FBI’s words, her “anti-U.S. government speeches espousing the Black Liberation Army message.” “Terrorism” is somehow inherent in the message of Black liberation. Advocacy of Black liberation, is the threat. The reward of $2 million is meant to silence Assata Shakur’s political speech, and remove her as a symbol of resistance to the U.S government.

“The Bureau has marked Shakur for priority assassination.”

For the National Security State, “terror” is a powerful word, with vast legal ramifications. The Obama administration is informing Americans and Cubans that Assata is as much fair game for assassination by drone as the late Anwar al-Awlaki. Barack Obama and Eric Holder are serving notice that those who share Assata’s ideology – as understood by the FBI – are subject to eradication as well, because it is an ideology of terror. And they are telling those who give “substantial support” to Assata that they are subject to detention by the U.S. military without trial or charge, for the duration of the war against “terror.”

The Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations will hold a demonstration on Thursday, May 9, from 5 to 7pm, in front of the Harlem State Office Building in New York City, to give substantial and unwavering support to the safety and freedom of Assata Shakur; Freedom for Sundiata Acoli and Sekou Odinga, Black Liberation Army members held in U.S. prisons; and Freedom for All Political Prisoners.

They tried to kill Assata in 1973, and they're still trying. They tried to kill the Black liberation movement, but its not dead yet. Join the Black is Back Coalition and a host of other concerned organizations at the Harlem State Office Building, on 125^th Street, at 5pm, on Thursday. Tell the real terrorists what you think about them, their austerity, their mass incarceration, and their wars. For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at GlenFord@BlackAgendaReport.com.

For more information, go to Black Is Back Coalition event Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/events/425416530887768/

HANDS OFF ASSATA! UNCLE SAM IS THE REAL TERRORIST!

On Thursday, May 9, 2013 at 5pm Eastern Standard Time, the New York City Chapter of the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice Peace and Reparations (BIBC) will hold a demonstration in front of the Harlem State Office Building to protest the U.S. government’s recent announcement of the increased bounty placed on the life of Assata Shakur from $1 million to $2 million and her addition to the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list.

The State claims that Assata Shakur is a U.S. domestic terrorist and is offering money to anyone who can take Assata from Cuba and bring her back, dead or alive, to the U.S. so that she can be forced to serve the rest of her “life sentence” for the alleged murder of a New Jersey state trooper in the early 1970s.

The BIBC is absolutely opposed to the U.S. governments labeling of Assata Shakur as a terrorist. Assata Shakur, like the masses of African and other oppressed peoples around the world, is a victim of terrorism inflicted by the U.S. government.

It is the U.S. government that has the longest track record of terrorism on the face of the planet. Currently there are over 700 U.S. military installations in the world today. In each of those colonized territories suffering such occupation, the people face outright terror. The Afghani people suffer civilian casualties on a regular basis due to trigger happy U.S. Marine maneuvers. The same can be said all over the planet.

In fact, Cuba, the country from which the U.S. aims to snatch Assata, has been a decade’s long victim of that same U.S. terrorism that African people in this country have come to know all too well. The economic embargos and military restrictions that the U.S. has imposed on the Cuban government and people are not unlike the public policy of policy containment of the Black community here in the U.S., a policy which serves at best as a poor substitute for economic development.

The U.S. occupation of Cuba (Guantanamo Bay) is not unlike the police occupation of the African community. The numerous assassination attempts by the U.S. on the life of Fidel Castro and other Cuban leaders is not unlike the U.S. COINTELPRO initiated assassinations of Malcolm X, Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King.

Assata is being labeled a terrorist by the U.S. only because of her relationship to the Black Liberation Army, which, during the 1960’s and 70’s engaged in armed struggle against the U.S. government as a means of liberating Black people from its oppressive domination.

The U.S. is intensifying its attack on all remnants and symbols of resistance from the last genuine period of revolutionary struggle in this country. This attack on Assata is an attack on the African Liberation Movement and African people in general that cannot go unchecked!

This attack on the part of the U.S. is not a sign of strength. It is a sign of weakness and desperation that was necessary on the part of U.S. imperialism as a means of overturning the tides of history that are on course to wipe imperialism completely out of existence.

BIB also understands that the intensifying attack being made against Assata and the African Liberation Movement in general could only be made possible, with minimal political consequence, through a neo-colonial Black president Obama and U.S. attorney general Eric Holder.

While these government officials are Black, it is clear that they do not represent the interests of Black people. It is Obama who has intensified a campaign of imperialist war against African and African people around the world. It is Obama who has ordered the dropping of drone bombs in various parts of the African continent. It is Obama who has given a green light to the police throughout the U.S. to shoot and kill African people at will, an initiative that has resulted in the most recent finding that an African is murdered by the police in the U.S. every 28 hours.

The fact is that while George Bush’s regime set the stage for the bounty on Assata, it is Obama who has played the leading role in the play of U.S. imperialist repression waged around the world, a play whose final act consists of such attempts to completely wipe out any remnant of African resistance within U.S. borders.

Assata Shakur on the other hand, has represented the genuine interests of African people since she joined the movement for Black Power, as she continues to do today—even as she lives in Cuba in exile because of her acts of righteous resistance during the 1960s.

The Black is Back Coalition is calling on all lovers of genuine freedom and social justice to unite with us and attend this very important demonstration being held in defense of Assatta Shakur.

Free Assatta! Free Sundiata! Free Sekou Odinga! Free All BLA Prisoners of War! Free All Political Prisoners!

Current list of demonstration endorsers and attendees include:
Peoples Organization for Progress (New Jersey)
Glen Ford (Black Agenda Report)
International Peoples Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) – NYC
Diop Olugbala – InPDUM President
African Peoples Socialist Party – Newark, NJ
Nellie Bailey – Harlem Tenants Council
Ralph Poynter – Lynn Stewart Defense Committee
Students United for a Free CUNY
Occupy Wall Street (Occu-Evolve) - Sumumba Sobukwe
Lisa Davis - Chair of Black is Back Healthcare Committee
Stop Stop and Frisk Freedom Fighters
The Peoples Survival Program (PSP)

End Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons, Prepare to Back Hunger Strikers

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

“Solitary confinement as a form of routine, mass punishment is beyond barbarity.”

Another prison hunger strike is looming in California, where more than 200 inmates at the Pelican Bay supermax have been in solitary confinement for between five and ten years and nearly 100 have been shut off from most human contact for 20 years or more. Across the nation, on any given day, more than 100,000 inmates suffer in solitary – about 25,000 in the federal system and another 80,000 or so in state facilities. That’s the equivalent of locking up every man, woman and child in Charleston, South Carolina, in their own little 8 by 12 foot box – for an eternity. Nothing like this American form of mass human torment has ever existed on the face of the earth: systematic, industrial strength torture, multiplied 100,000 times per day. Solitary confinement as a form of routine, mass punishment is beyond barbarity. Nowhere in human history do we find barbarians who tortured hundreds of thousands of people every day for decades at a time. Only in America.

Solitary confinement, by its very nature, is designed to ensure that no one but the torturers hears the cries of the tormented. However, knowledge of such monstrous evil compels decent men and women to action, in solidarity with those who have been wronged. The prisoners of Pelican Bay, who went on hunger strike in 2011, have sent word that they will do so again, on July 8, if the state of California does not meet their core demands. One demand is fundamental: that inmates not be confined to solitary unless they have been charged, “and found guilty of, committing a serious offense… a felony!” Instead, inmates are consigned to a life of oblivion based on anonymous allegations that they are affiliated with a gang, or for exhibiting the slightest hint of political thought – or for no discernable reason, at all. Not only is lengthy solitary confinement unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment, and a form of torture under international law, it is totally arbitrary and capricious.

“Support networks need to be in place, beforehand.”

In California, alone, more than 14,000 prisoners are held in isolation. The Pelican Bay inmates anticipate many of them will join the hunger strike, as thousands did in 2011, when 13 prisons were involved in the protest, and three inmates committed suicide. This time around, prison organizers have invited the participation of “all male and female prisoners across the U.S. prison systems,” both state and federal. Inmates in Georgia went on hunger strike, pressing a range of demands, in 2011 and again last year.

If the California prisoners are forced to put their lives on the line again, on July 8, support networks need to be in place, beforehand. The Stop Mass Incarceration Network is putting out the call, so that the inmates at Pelican Bay and throughout the vast U.S. prison gulag will know that folks on the outside have their back. June 21, 22 and 23 have been designated as Days of Solidarity With the Struggle to End Prison Torture, and to immediately disband the torture chambers. You can sign up by going to StopMassIncarceration.org.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

For more information, contact the Stop Mass Incarceration Network at: stopmassincarceration@gmail.com, or by calling (347) 979-SMIN (7646)

The New Urban Regime: Gentrification in Atlanta Wears A Black Face

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Bruce A. Dixon

Edgewood Courts, a modest 200 plus unit Atlanta apartment complex is widely believed to be up for imminent sale. The surrounding neighborhood, like many in Atlanta, is being reclaimed by whiter and more affluent transplants, with the open blessing of mostly black city hall. Those who show up at local meetings of the area's Neighborhood Planning Unit, the quasi-governmental contraption through which some public monies and functions are funneled without the bother of involving less wealthy, less connected residents, are mostly in agreement ---- Edgewood's residents, including its children, present a clear and present nuisance, perhaps even a danger to the property values and lifestyles of their new neighbors, as proven by the stats which measure not crime, but police activity. Police simply don't bang on the doors of the affluent, or confront and abuse the children of yuppies.

Edgewood's adults and its children, then, are deemed deserving of aggressive and sustained attention by the only domestic part of government that grows in these times of austerity --- the police. Atlanta cops, for their part make it a point to attend all Neighborhood Planning Unit meetings, presumably to be available for just such instances. And sure enough, the complaints of well-off neighbors have resulted in a number of arrests and tense confrontations between dozens of police and residents over the last few weeks.

The apartment complex is owned by H.J. Russell, a black construction and real estate firm. Like everybody else in that business, they don't make money off stable neighborhoods. They only get paid when there's people moving out, and new people moving in. So mostly white yuppies sic black city hall and black cops on their black working class neighbors so they'll feel safer, and black realtors and tycoons can get richer.

The awfulness of what's happening in Atlanta's Edgewood Courts is that it's not unique or original at all. Anywhere black politicians are in power nowadays, their chief function seems to be that of what sociologist Jay Arena in his book Driven From New Orleans calls “the new urban regime...” Black politicians are able to serve white elites, and themselves better and more effectively than white politicians ever could alone. Black politicians, under the new urban regime are successful when they divert attention away from their actual policies and onto issues of status and symbolism.

When Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed runs for re-election later this year the call will be to protect the voice of black Atlanta from its first white mayor in forty years. It won't be about the mayor's gutting of employee pension funds, or his agenda of school and transit privatization. It won't be about Atlanta's racial poverty gap, at about 4 blacks to every one 1 white, the highest in the nation's forty largest cities..

Black Mecca is over. Welcome to the new urban regime.

For Black Agenda Report, I'm Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via this site's contact page, or email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

Genocide Toll in Somalia Revised Upward

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

“The Americans turned to mass starvation as a weapon of war.”

A new study shows that twice as many people died in 2011, in Somalia, than previously reported. The British government had estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 Somalis succumbed to hunger during the great drought, but the new study concludes that 260,000 died, half of them under the age of six.

As usual, corporate media coverage of the mass starvation puts the blame on the Shabaab fighters who have been resisting the United States and its allies’ war against the Somali people when, in fact, the death toll represents an American crime against humanity; just one chapter in an ongoing genocide that began in December, 2006. That’s when the U.S. and Ethiopia invaded Somalia to overthrow a broad-based Islamic Courts government that had defeated warlords supported by the United States. The savage assault from air, land and sea created what UN observers described as “the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa.” It was a bloodbath engineered in George Bush’s Washington, and which has continued under President Obama.

The initial cause of the holocaust was not drought, but the savage slaughter of civilians by the invading Ethiopians and the resultant collapse of Somali agriculture. Mogadishu, the capital city, was put under a siege that would last for half a decade, while civilians were chased across the countryside by Ethiopian armor and bombed by U.S. aircraft. The United Nations Children’s Fund representative for Somalia spoke of the “dirtiness” of a conflict in which “children are the real target.”

Nevertheless, in the first years the war did not go well for Washington, whose Ethiopian allies who were forced to withdraw from much of the country after heavy losses. The Americans then turned to mass starvation as a weapon of war – a calculated act of genocide.

“The U.S. tried to break the resistance by starving out the people.”

By late 2009, the U.S. began withholding food aid to the humanitarian relief agencies on which half of Somalis in the south and central parts of the country depended for survival, endangering three million people. The main sources of food were warehouses under U.S. control in neighboring Kenya, but the Americans drastically restricted the flow, complaining that too much food was going to Shabaab fighters. In effect, the U.S. tried to break the resistance by starving out the people – a genocide by any legal definition. By early 2011, the worst drought in decades was gripping the region, adding a natural layer of disaster to the manmade catastrophe that had begun in late 2006.

The scale of the horror was tremendous, made worse by the escalation of war and the entrance of Kenya into the carnage as an American client. Yet, the British claimed that only 50,000 to 100,000 died, and the United States declined to produce any official estimate. Finally, six and a half years after the U.S. plunged Somalia into hell, international officials are admitting that at least a quarter of a million people perished during just one period of the U.S.-backed invasion – all of them on President Obama’s watch.

The United States is an infernal killing machine, no matter the color of the criminal in the White House.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Rep. Keith Ellison, the Personification of the Phony, Pro-War “Progressive”
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford
“Ellison is part of the pro-war Left, whose primary mission is make self-described liberals and leftists comfortable supporting imperial wars.”
Keith Ellison, the Black U.S. House member from Minneapolis who is co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, says the U.S. should push for a no-fly zone over rebel-held areas in Syria. Ellison, who is also one of only two Muslim members of Congress, appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, as did Republican Arizona Senator John McCain. It is a measure of how far to the right the Democratic Party has come under President Obama, that McCain, the war monger who likes to sing about bombing Iran, and Ellison, who claims to be a progressive, are in basic agreement over Syria. Both McCain and Ellison want no-fly zones, and both claim to prefer that there be no U.S. “boots on the ground” in country. Both are raving American imperialists who believe that the U.S. has not merely the right, but the obligation to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries. As Ellison, the phony progressive, puts it, “I don’t think the world’s greatest superpower, the United States, can stand by and do nothing” – which is, essentially, John McCain’s position.
Ellison has been advocating a no-fly zone for Syria for at least a year. Last May, he told U.S. News and World Report that so-called “safe zones” should be set up by the U.S. and its allies around the borders of Syria. Ellison made it quite clear that he sees such zones as a prelude to regime change. “I think the Libyan action was a good example of that,” he said.
“Both are raving American imperialists.”
On U.S. imperial policy, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between McCain, the hard-right Republican, and Ellison, who purports to be a progressive Democrat. Neither gives a damn about international law or the rights of smaller people’s to shape their own destinies. Ellison went to Saudi Arabia, the most socially backward rich country on the planet, and described the King as a “visionary leader.” He rejected George Bush’s troop “surge in 2007, by calling it “too little, too late.” Like Obama, he quibbles about whether U.S. wars are smart or dumb, too late or right on time, but never about the inherent right of the United States to wage war against the weaker nations of the world.
Ellison is part of the pro-war Left, which includes Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, whose primary mission is make self-described liberals and leftists comfortable supporting imperial wars. McCain can’t do that, but Ellison can. Amnesty International is shameless enough to use women’s rights as an excuse to support continued occupation of Afghanistan.
Much of the pro-war left has been forced by events to recognize that the U.S. and its allies are backing jihadist Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in Syria – people they wouldn’t like to have brunch with. Therefore, they now demand that the U.S. intervene to make sure that the jihadists don’t get their hands on chemical weapons. Thus, the pro-war left starts off by advocating U.S. intervention to facilitate the coming to power of the rebels, but in the end winds up demanding that the U.S. do whatever it can to stop these guys from taking power. Either way, it ends with U.S. intervention. John McCain and Keith Ellison pretend to be on opposite ideological ends, but they are like Jack and Jill walking up the same hill when it comes to the obligations and privileges of U.S. imperialism.
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

US & France Intervene in Mali To Protect Land & Resource Grabs, Not Because of Al Qeda

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

On March 15, former General and AFRICOM commander Carter F. Ham testified before the House Armed Services Committee that the situation in the West African republic of Mali is, along with that in Nigeria and Somalia, “a direct threat to the national security of the United States.” In plain language, claiming a direct threat to US national security is the standard justification for murderous military intervention around the world, and Mali has just been added to the hit list.

Echoing official sources like General Ham, corporate media tell us that Al Qeda and related Islamist forces, flush with weapons from the recent conflict in Libya, are poised to overrun Mali. Should we believe them? Aren't they the same folks who once assured us Saddam, and nowadays Iran, have nuclear weapons? Of course they are, and the real reasons for US intervention are something else entirely.

Since the Clinton administration, the US has provided military aid, weapons and training to 52 out of 54 African nations, ensuring that Africa, the motherland of humanity, remains the poorest and most war-torn region on earth. The US is in Africa to lock down its resources, Africa's energy, water, minerals, timber, agriculture, and biodiversity for the Western corporate elite. Strong African civil societies are, in the view of the US and its allies, bad for business, because they would mean Africans controlling their own energy, water, minerals, timber, agriculture and biodiversity.

Al Qeda, the Islamists and Tuareg rebels aren't the big problem in Mali. The big problem is that Mali's so-called democratic government discredited itself by evicting tens of thousands of farmers and their villages to grant foreign concerns long term leases on vast tracts of prime farmland and water, so Malians didn't much care when it was swept aside by another government committed to the same policies, and seem in no rush to defend that regime either. So the US stepped in, and is currently airlifting, supplying, feeding and providing gasoline to a French mechanized infantry battalion in Mali to make sure foreigners keep that Malian land and water.

The largest of the predatory land grabs in Mali is called Malibya, that's M as in mother, A as in apple Libya, google it for yourself. Malibya was a deal signed with the Khadafi government to ensure Libya's food security with a long term lease of 150 square miles of Malian territory for a vast GMO rice and cattle plantation, irrigated by a 25 mile canal that would drain vast quantities of water from the Niger River. Libya produces vast amounts of oil but little food. Now that the US and their junior partners, the French, have re-established control over Libyan oil, they need Mali's water and agriculture to make their neocolonial contraption sustainable, even if Malians and the tens of millions downriver in other countries suffer. The Pentagon, and its local tentacle AFRICOM, also require Mali for drone, mercenary and special ops bases that can directly penetrate the dozen or so African states west of Nigeria.

Some of the forces of Malian civil society, such as Malian farmers were present at the recent World Social Forum last month in Tunisia. Western corporate media however, is uninterested in reporting their stories, and despite its highly visible and self-celebrating African American political class, there exists no effective constituency for Africa in the US.

For Black Agenda Radio I'm Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a state committee member of the Georgia Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be contacted at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com or via this site's contact page.

White Chechens Open New Vistas of Repression in America

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

“The whole nation has been set up for a new round of domestic repression.”

The United States of America has collapsed into a phantasmagoria – an inverted world conjured up by imperial minds to fool the home population of the planet’s only superpower into believing they are under siege by virtually everyone else on Earth. The formula has worked too well, rendering the society so brittle, so anxious and afraid, it resembles a madhouse in a fortress that is trying to turn itself into a prison.

Once again, white America (and lots of assimilated non-whites) shows it has absolutely no capacity for introspection – only for projecting its own insanities on others. The New York Times for Sunday, April 21st, speculated that the suspects in the Boston bombing were motivated by “echoes” of “plots from the past” in their ancestral Chechnya, in the Caucuses region of Russia – but, in reality, the scenario was purely 21^st century Americana. Where else could two young men with small arms and improvised explosives – if the charges are true – represent a threat so awesomely dreadful as to spread fear up and down the great megalopolis stretching from Boston to Washington?

If the two young Chechens were set up by the U.S. government, as their mother says, they are not the only ones. The whole nation has been set up for a new round of domestic repression. It has already begun, with the stripping down of Miranda warnings for persons arrested by police and the lockdown of whole sections of greater Boston, where the authorities treated white neighborhoods as if…well, as if they were Black.

In our post-911 world, we might expect that the events in Boston would lead to drone strikes or invasions of other countries to avenge American “honor.” But Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation, which retains its nuclear arsenal, so that won’t do. Besides, it turns out the FBI was in much closer touch with the older brother than any Russian officials – so, maybe the Russians ought to be the ones asking the questions. These were, after all, American citizens.

“Some have blonde or red hair.”

We hear a lot of talk about naming the surviving brother as an “enemy combatant,” but – a combatant for whom? For Allah? You can’t launch airstrikes against God. The Americans have to be careful about trying to tie their prisoner to the Chechen Islamist fighters who have made such a name for themselves around the world, since many of them are allied with the same gunmen the U.S. has financed and armed in Libya and Syria. In the end, there seems to be no enemy for Washington to punish – except American society, itself.

In this regard, the Chechen brothers’ ethnicity opens new vistas of domestic repression. Many Chechens are white – I mean, really white. Wikipedia describes them as “exhibiting traits typical of European and Caucasian peoples.” Some have “blonde or red hair,” with blue eyes and “typically pale skin.”

Does this mean that white people will lose their immunity from being arbitrarily accosted by Homeland Security? That would certainly be a sea change in American life. But, in the enemy-filled phantasmagoria that the United States has become, anything is possible.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.