Heroes And Zeroes
2 hours ago
Showing posts with label Poverty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poverty. Show all posts
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Martin Luther King Jr., Domestic Terrorist: This post is dedicated to Barack Obama
"In 2010 we must all reach the difficult conclusion that the presence of Barack Obama requires the absence of Dr. King and that the former is more a system's protective response to the latter than any kind of continuation."
"...I am in Birmingham because injustice is here."
"Each year we pay tribute to a man who in reality ceased to exist long before he was assassinated.By April of 1968 King had become a national pariah. Moderate civil rights leaders became troubled by his stances against wars of aggression in Vietnam and throughout the continent of Africa and Latin America.
The establishment press depicted him as inspiring 'fear' among White House and Justice Department officials for his continued work against structural inequality which they saw as leanings toward 'communism,' 'Leninism' and as being too friendly to the likes of Stokely Carmichael.
In 2010 we must all reach the difficult conclusion that the presence of Barack Obama requires the absence of Dr. King and that the former is more a system's protective response to the latter than any kind of continuation." --Jared Ball, Professor of communication studies, Morgan State University
If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, he wouldn't be talking about 'race', he'd be talking about poverty, and endless war.
Indeed, he was starting to do just that, discussing US IMPERIALISM in places like Vietnam, how it affected ALL Americans, and how the money was being spent on war, not ploughshares.... to the detriment of ALL Americans, and global society, for the benefit of a few.
The "Few" were NOT pleased. Dr. King was "Safe" for the White 'moderates' of America compared to Stokely Carmichael, SNCC, and the Black self defense groups springing up throughout the South threatening to take on the KKK and other racist organizatons. These groups consisted of returned/returning Black veterans of America's Imperial wars of the time (Korea and Vietnam), and they WERE deadly serious (Cf. Simon Wendt's "The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights").
Per Wikipedia:
"Many white southern segregationists vilified King; moreover, this speech ("Beyond Vietnam") soured his relationship with many members of the mainstream media. Life magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi",[80] and The Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."[84]""...his people"... How... RACIST and DIVISIVE.
Then, despite continual FBI surveillance (and harrassment), Reverend King was assassinated by an alleged 'lone gunman', James Earl Ray ("Ray testified that he did not shoot King to the House Select Committee on Assassinations" [src]), who King's family came to believe was NOT responsible for the shooting.
Today Da Buffalo wants to Re-Present an excerpt of a sermon at the Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 which has come to be called "Beyond Vietnam".
Black Forum records, a subsidiary of Berry Gordy's Motown put it on vinyl, and the Reverend's speech won a Grammy in 1970 for the "Best Spoken Word Recording".
Indeed, all one has to do is replace the references to Vietnam with the words "Iraq" and "Afghanistan" in the speech that follows and you can easily see that, for the most part, we HAVE NOT accomplished, or even (as a nation) attempted to achieve the goals spoken of here by Martin Luther King Jr.
Say AMEN!"Peace and Civil Rights don't mix they say, so this morning I speak to you on this issue because I am determined to take the Gospel seriously..."
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"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar... ...it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
Think on that while listening to the Reverend's sermon, as the Obama administration "bails out" the mortgage brokers and financial institutions allowing them to continue paying bonuses to their employees larger than most people in America, or on Earth, earn in their lifetimes, while leaving the mortgage holders, in many cases, homeless, and people who have lost their jobs in the current economic depression with no recourse but soup kitchens and poverty... ...or given an appropriate age, a job in the the US military, as the only available employer, for the Pentagon's DIRTY WARS in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places not often mentioned in the US media.
[Pop Out Player]
Text of the entire sermon
Real Audio file (.ram) of the entire sermon (41:50 minutes) :
A BIG H/t to Sam Husseini, from whom I gleaned a number of links for this post.
Sam has the last word:
"There is one minor quibble I have with this sermon -- it ends with the lines"And nations will not rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore. And I don't know about you, I ain't gonna study war no more."But I think we do need to study war. We need to study war and all its destructiveness in excruciating detail." [src]
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Stan Goff, Feral Scholar - "There are some obstacles, the greatest being the attitude that we should give Obama a chance before we start hectoring"
Before everyone gets TOO enthusiastic...
This Viral Video appeared during the election campaign.
It pretty much sums up the problem:
"We have some serious evils in our faces right now; and if we are going to confront them, then we need to list them, organize against them, and make that opposition felt in the principalities and powers.Excerpted from the comments:Big pharma.
Big food.
Big war.
Big oil.
Big banks.
Big prisons.
And the big-dick culture of me-first domination and revenge.
I have a litmus test, if anyone is interested.
Let’s see if Guantanamo is closed in the first month of the new administration."
Susan/catlady:Obama’s transition website, change.gov, is set up for citizens to make suggestions to the new administration.There are several pages under “Agenda,” listing current policy.
A search for “Guantanamo” comes up zilch.
A Look Under the Hood at the (Potential) Obama Administration
7th November 2008, 05:35 am
by Stan
[Hat tip to Lisa… this one merits a post.]
By Joshua Frank
November 06, 2008 — - Tuesday’s celebration hangovers have finally started to wear off, and the pieces are beginning to fall into place. Change will be coming to Washington in January, but it is difficult to decipher what form it will take. Early clues, however, suggest that Barack Obama’s administration will prove unlikely to alter the fundamental political machinery that has led us into war and economic turmoil. Below is a brief summary of Obama’s potential choices for a few key roles in his administration.
Chief of Staff
Obama’s key White House position will go to Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois. While Emanuel knows his way around the corridors of Washington, qualifying him in the traditional sense, this alone doesn’t mean he’s the guy you want drawing up Obama’s policy papers day after day.
For starters, Emanuel is a shameless neoliberal with close ties to the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), even co-authoring a strategy book with DLC president Bruce Reed. Without Emanuel, Bill Clinton would not have been able to thrust NAFTA down the throats of environmentalists and labor in the mid-1990s. Over the course of his career, Emanuel’s made it a point to cozy up to big business, making him one of the most effective corporate fundraisers in the Democratic Party. He’s also a staunch advocate of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.
Emanuel’s shining moment came in 2006 as he helped funnel money and poured ground support into the offices of dozens of conservative Democrats, expanding his party’s control of the House of Representatives. Emanuel, who supports the War…
FULL
Stan: The best analog we have in history here is the administration of FDR, where the president was compelled by the perils of increasing popular discontent to provide the space for popular power. It was a development paradigm, eg, the TVA, so there is an ecological apsect to this that is completely and critically different.
Barring the revolutionary transformation of society in one fell swoop, the system is going to require some duct tape and bailing wire to hold it together for the time being, or folk will literally starve. This will likely require a Keynesian intervention of some kind (or it all goes over a cliff, and Obama’s administration is counted by history as more of the same shit). Key here is a public works jobs program; and if we don’t fight like crazy for one that focuses on reparing biospheric damage, then shame on every one of us.
Just as urgently, however, we have to rebuild an antiwar movement worthy of its name.
There are some obstacles, the greatest being the attitude that we should give Obama a chance before we start hectoring.
That’s dead wrong… immoral in fact.
Every day that these occupations go on is a terrible sin; and our silence and forebearance are forms of complicity.
In Full @ Feral Scholar
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
The WTO, World Bank, and IMF - Destroying African (or insert name of third world country here) Agriculture - Walden Bello, FPIF
U.S. Agriculture Secretary John Block put it at the start of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations in 1986, “the idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on U.S. agricultural products, which are available, in most cases at lower cost.
Meanwhile, in America:
Destroying African Agriculture
Walden Bello | June 3, 2008
Editor: John Feffer
Foreign Policy In Focus
Whether in Latin America, Asia, or Africa, the story has been the same: the destabilization of peasant producers by a one-two punch of IMF-World Bank structural adjustment programs that gutted government investment in the countryside followed by the massive influx of subsidized U.S. and European Union agricultural imports after the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture pried open markets. .
African agriculture is a case study of how doctrinaire economics serving corporate interests can destroy a whole continent’s productive base.
From Exporter to Importer
At the time of decolonization in the 1960s, Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter, its exports averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966-70. Today, the continent imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the last three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Southern Africa, and Central Africa.
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The World Bank and other aid donors forced the drastic scaling down and eventual scrapping of the (Malawi program), arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, food output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its strategic grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied.
When the crisis in food production turned into a famine in 2001-2002, there were hardly any reserves left to rush to the countryside. About 1,500 people perished.
The IMF, however, was unrepentant; in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program with the government on the grounds that “the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government interventions in the food and other agricultural markets…crowd out more productive spending.”
When an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the government finally had enough of the Bank and IMF’s institutionalized stupidity. A new president reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy program, enabling two million households to buy fertilizer at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount.
The results: bumper harvests for two years in a row, a surplus of one million tons of maize, and the country transformed into a supplier of corn to other countries in Southern Africa...
Walden Bello | June 3, 2008
Editor: John Feffer
Foreign Policy In Focus
Biofuel production is certainly one of the culprits in the current global food crisis. But while the diversion of corn from food to biofuel feedstock has been a factor in food prices shooting up, the more primordial problem has been the conversion of economies that are largely food-self-sufficient into chronic food importers. Here the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) figure as much more important villains.
Whether in Latin America, Asia, or Africa, the story has been the same: the destabilization of peasant producers by a one-two punch of IMF-World Bank structural adjustment programs that gutted government investment in the countryside followed by the massive influx of subsidized U.S. and European Union agricultural imports after the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture pried open markets. .
African agriculture is a case study of how doctrinaire economics serving corporate interests can destroy a whole continent’s productive base.
From Exporter to Importer
At the time of decolonization in the 1960s, Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter, its exports averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966-70. Today, the continent imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the last three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Southern Africa, and Central Africa.
.
.
.
.
.
The World Bank and other aid donors forced the drastic scaling down and eventual scrapping of the (Malawi program), arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, food output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its strategic grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied.
When the crisis in food production turned into a famine in 2001-2002, there were hardly any reserves left to rush to the countryside. About 1,500 people perished.
The IMF, however, was unrepentant; in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program with the government on the grounds that “the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government interventions in the food and other agricultural markets…crowd out more productive spending.”
When an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the government finally had enough of the Bank and IMF’s institutionalized stupidity. A new president reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy program, enabling two million households to buy fertilizer at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount.
The results: bumper harvests for two years in a row, a surplus of one million tons of maize, and the country transformed into a supplier of corn to other countries in Southern Africa...
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