A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

The Republican House majority hadn't even taken their seats yet, but their presence wasn't necessary to pass the biggest military budget since World War II. Not only can't Obama blame his wars on George Bush, but the First Black President has dramatically outdone his predecessor in expenditures on the machinery of death. “Yet only 12 Black members of Congress can bring themselves to vote against Obama's wars.”

Obama War Budget Breaks All Records – But When Will Black America Break with Him?

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“Forget about the Obama’s phony rhetoric; the proof is in the numbers.”

On Capitol Hill, resistance to U.S. militarism has all but collapsed – and the Republican majority in the U.S. House has not even arrived, yet. With no opposition whatsoever in the Senate, and only 48 nay votes in the House, the Congress last week passed the biggest military budget since the end of World War Two. Only 42 Democrats, including just 12 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, dared to defy their warmongering president and compliant House leadership.

From the moment that Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination, we at Black Agenda Report have been predicting that he would become the most pro-war president in modern American history. Forget about the Obama’s phony rhetoric; the proof is in the numbers.

The military budget firmly cements Barack Obama’s place as the biggest pro-war president in two generations. Today, the United States, although it is the world’s only superpower, spends almost as much as all of the rest of the world’s militaries, combined. The U.S. defense authorization for 2011 is $725 billion. China, with the second most expensive military machine on the planet, spends less than $80 billion a year.

If Barack Obama lasts for eight years in office, he is on track to spend $5 trillion dollars on the Pentagon, significantly more than George Bush, who in turn spent a lot more than Ronald Reagan. But, as they say on the TV commercials, that's not all. The defense budget doesn’t include expenditures for Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy, military aid to other countries through the Department of State, NASA space programs that are really military projects, the military retirement fund run out of the Department of Treasury, and the interest payments on past military expenditures that were financed by debt. Inclusion of those hidden costs of war would bring military-related spending to well over $1 trillion dollars a year – and rising all the time.

“The Black misleadership class in general demands that African Americans sacrifice their own economic survival interests to Barack Obama's political interests.”

In real dollars, the U.S. is spending far more on the military than at any time during the Cold War, when there was another superpower in competition, and more than President Lyndon Johnson spent at the height of the Vietnam War. Dr. Martin Luther King broke with LBJ over that war, in part because he knew, in King’s words, “that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.”

Under the First Black President, that military suction tube is far bigger and more destructive than in Dr. King's day, while the economic crisis is arguably much worse, threatening the very viability of Black America as a national community. Yet only 12 Black members of Congress can bring themselves to vote against Obama's wars, and the Black misleadership class in general demands that African Americans sacrifice their own economic survival interests to Barack Obama's political interests.

Obama is not merely a continuation of the Bush administration's war policies, he has accelerated the descent into a war economy. That is nothing for any Black person to be proud about.

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

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

by BAR editor and columnist Jared A. Ball

Righteous hatred of injustice is a very good thing, no matter what the pacifiers and accommodators (get paid to) say. And if injustice fuels determined resistance, then 2010 should have been a gusher year. 2011 promises to provide even more cause for righteous hatred. For example, the NAACP is taking big bucks from Wells Fargo, the destroyer of Black neighborhoods and whole cities, to teach Black people how to be responsible with (what’s left of) their money. Who deserves our hatred most, the giver or the receiver?

Thanks 2010? 2011: The Hate That Hate Produced!

by BAR editor and columnist Jared A. Ball

“More Black people are going to prison and police brutality was so rampant this year that it is simply hate gift-wrapped!”

In 1959 Mike Wallace and CBS made the first of what would become the last of the major media mistakes of the modern era. They may have thought that by producing their series The Hate That Hate Produced and by showing a national audience the kind of Black rage at white America that existed beneath the veneer of a seemingly more hospitable Civil Rights Movement that this hate-filled form would be demonized. But their giving air time to Malcolm X and then the subsequent offer of space and time by other mainstream media outlets to other Black radical elements in the country backfired and helped spread a revolutionary consciousness that ultimately threatened this country’s established order. But, no more, and as one movement veteran has said, “today they only put fools on the air.”

I bring this up now because as the year comes to an end and the season’s mythology takes me over I’d like to return to this idea of a mistake made and the potential in 2011 for the hate that hate has produced to become a positive. And especially since being associated with the leading Black left internet operation often means I hear people telling me that “you all at Black Agenda Report are too hard on Black people,” or “you all are too pessimistic” or simply that we are all “a bunch of haters,” I’d like to take a moment to reflect on how 2010 may mean something great for 2011. I mean, I am proud – especially at this time of year – of my anti-religiousness, of being a heathen. And I am also a proud part of a small but growing cadre of haters who look to reclaim that concept from pop rappers who turned “hatin’” into a preemptive strike against legitimate criticism of their complicity in our oppression – our mantra being “Hate Harder!” But even I am not impervious to the impact of seasonal propaganda that has turned an African astrological allegory into an imperial hostile resource and consciousness grab. So lets take this wreckage of 2010 and see in it its accidental – dare I even say dialectical – positive potential for a revolutionary 2011. Let this seasonal moment be more than a commemoration of the birth of Gerald Massey’s “mythological Christ.” Let this become the moment of a rebirth of an organized hate that hate produced!

“Black unemployment and poverty have increased while attention to issues of Blackness in the press have decreased.”

And it can be! Look at the gift 2010 has turned out to be in helping establish a righteous hatred of what exists! Two years into Obama’s presidency and we have to be more clear than ever that Kwame Ture was right! Black visibility is indeed not Black Power! Black unemployment and poverty have increased while attention to issues of Blackness in the press have decreased. More Black people are going to prison and police brutality was so rampant this year that it is simply hate gift-wrapped! Oh, and look! More Latinos have been imprisoned, detained and deported under Obama than any other two year period in U.S. history! And for our dear sisters and brothers of Arab or Persian persuasion, you’ve gotten more bombs, more threats of bombs, more Israeli settlements and targeted assassinations! Yes! All that yummy hatred delivered year-round!

Oh and look! We also got more broken promises regarding the internet. Mhmmm, yummy, hateful goodness. So as we are forcibly moved more and more online we have less protection from those who promised they would offer it to us. Remember Obama’s line once upon a time about being “second to none” in protecting net neutrality? Well, now that he and his FCC have all but made sure this is never going to happen, its just more hate that can produce more hate! And ooh, this summer we also got the One Nation Working Together rally that made Al Sharpton’s Reclaiming the Dream rally look like a guerrilla warfare training camp! And speaking of Sharpton, you know, the one that marched to reclaim Dr. King, he is so hateful that he is now openly referred to by the establishment press as a “surrogate” in service to Obama whose role most recently is to tell Black people that this latest hate-filled tax bill will actually help them. Mhmmm… the hate tastes so good!

And perhaps the icing on this hate cake can be the story that is slowly beginning to emerge of how the oldest civil rights organization now has its financial literacy program funded by the very organization that helped wipe out Black and Brown home-ownership! That’s right boys and girls! Wells Fargo is giving the NAACP a bunch of money to have that organization teach Black people to be more responsible with their money instead of defending those people against the predatory lending of their new sponsor.

Mhmm… I for one couldn’t be happier with 2010 and I couldn’t be more optimistic that 2011 will be the year of the organized hate that hate produced.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Jared Ball. While you still can visit us online at BlackAgendaReport.com!

Jared A. Ball can be reached via email (at least for now!) at freemixradio@gmail.com.

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

Europeans and Euro-Americans are proud of their heroes, even if – especially if – they are mass murderers and mega-thieves. Some are incensed at African demands that the bones of the infamous imperialist Cecil Rhodes be dug up from his Zimbabwean grave and shipped back to England. But “no people have an obligation to respect the graves of their murderers.”

Let the Imperial Bones Rot in their Own Countries

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“The victims of British imperialism have every right to expunge the influence – including the rotting bodies – of their former oppressors and tormentors.”

The mayor of Zimbabwe’s second largest city, Bulawayo, says the remains of the infamous British imperialist Cecil Rhodes should be dug up and sent back to Great Britain. Sounds like a good idea to me. Britain has exported many things to the world, most notably, mass murder, the annihilation and suppression of whole nations and peoples, and Cecil Rhodes was one of the great practitioners of imperial slaughter. Certainly, the victims of British imperialism have every right to expunge the influence – including the rotting bodies – of their former oppressors and tormentors. The arch-racist Cecil Rhodes, whose most fervent belief was that Africans should not be sovereign in their own lands, has no right to pollute those same lands with his foul presence. No people have an obligation to respect the graves of their murderers.

The Daily Mail newspaper, of London, carried the story of Bulawayo’s mayor’s complaint. Based on readers’ comments about the piece, it is clear that a white-ruled country is the proper resting place for Cecil Rhodes. An Irish reader lamented his own people’s sufferings at the hands of the British, and wrote that, “by today’s standards” Rhodes would certainly be incarcerated for his crimes “after trial in the Hague.” Then the Irishman railed against what British bankers have recently done to his own country. But in the end, he concluded that British crimes were not quite as bad as those of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.

What bizarre reasoning! The Irishman believes that centuries of British murder and pillage around the globe, including in his own country, is not as bad as what he imagines one Black man in a relatively small country has done in the course of only 30 years in power. In the final analysis, the Irishman prefers the idea of white power, no matter how bestial and murderous, to Black power in a Black country.

“The existence of one Black man who has the impudence to give the finger to Europe is considered a threat to civilization.”

Other newspaper readers from England, Australia and South Africa were even more dismissive of the effrontery of a Black mayor in the sovereign nation of Zimbabwe calling for the exhumation and deportation of the bones of an imperialist killer and mega-thief. For all of these writers, five centuries of constant European aggression against all of the non-white people's of the planet amounts to...well, not very much in the larger scheme of things. But the existence of one Black man who has the impudence to give the finger to Europe is considered a threat to civilization. Such thinking is only logical when one believes that white power and human civilization are the same thing.

The United States, which behaves as a great white power regardless of who is the nominal president, is even more narrow-minded than Europe in its dealings with the non-white world. U.S. rulers, including Barack Obama, believe that Washington has the inalienable right to smash and eradicate anyone or anything that might be an impediment to American global hegemony, which they believe is synonymous with human civilization – just as Cecil Rhodes equated British power with civilization, itself. Which is why the British and the American imperialists are, in reality, the world's worst barbarians.

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

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