Video: Marvin X and the BAM Poets Choir & Arkestra: The Black Arts Movement Celebrating Amiri Baraka
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Beyonce, Jay-Z and the Mythology of Pussy and Dick
Jay-Z and Beyonce are reportedly on their way to divorce court
There’s the old saying that “All good things must come to an end.” But the saying probably wasn’t supposed to apply to marriage. The New York Daily News is reporting that the crown royale couple of America, Jay-Z and Beyonce, is going to be no more. The two are allegedly putting together plans for an amicable split and now engaged in the process of figuring out the business and financial implications of a pending divorce.
According to an inside source, the two are being told to pretend to be a big happy family for the public, so as not to cause a media frenzy. But they say that the two plan on releasing a joint statement in Septembr, telling the world that their marriage is no more. Of course, this is all set to occur after their $100 million dollar “On the Run” tour has been run to its entirety.
“Let’s leave it at it’s only a matter of time (until they split.) It’s so obvious now it’s embarrassing,” a source tells Confidenti@l.
“Around the time the tour ends, they’ll make a choice on whether they want to separate or admit trouble.”
Another source says that Jay-Z is all but done with the marriage.
“He wants this tour to end and he wants the rumors to stop,” the second source said.
One of the insiders says that the marriage has been a farce all along, and that the couple has kept it up for image purposes. This union has been profitable for both, with them raking in a collective net worth in the neighborhood of a billion dollars.
Sources tell the New York Daily News that Beyonce is even searching for her own place.
“This (trouble) has been brewing longer than anyone knows,” one of the sources said. “They’re performers. And they’re good performers. It’s a business now, and they are business partners. And they don’t even fight. They know what it is.”
The Daily News is reporting that a big part of the problem is that Jay-Z is not satisfied with being with just one woman. He’s accused of sleeping around a bit, as many rich celebrities tend to do. There are also reports that the two are tired of keeping up the charade for the public. It’s just hard work.
“They are both being advised on how to look like they’re together. A negative report comes out, or a breakup report comes out, and they are advised to post a picture with Blue Ivy,” the source said.
You Don't Know Me
you had a chance to know me
before we made love
you had a chance to know my mind
understand my fears
learn about issues
help me heal some things
but you wanted to make love
so you don't know me
we made love
but you don't know me
don't have a clue
think I'm a good dick
or you some good tight pussy
but you don't know me
and never will now
because you wanted to make love
you wanted to get a nut
we didn't even talk much
a little bit leading up to sex
I went along
I was horny too
but you don't know me
and I don't know you
now we never will
we blew it forever
because we made love
too fast too quick too soon
now you think you own me
I can't breathe
can't talk on the phone to friends
because we made love
because I gave you some dick
you gave me some pussy
now I'm no longer human
I'm your love slave
you my slave
we're in love but you don't know me
we gonna get married
but you don't know me
we're gonna have children
but you don't know me
you're gonna beat my ass
but you don't know me
you're going to jail
but you don't know me
we're getting a divorce
but you don't know me
now we're friends "Just Friends" Charlie Parker tune
But you don't know me and never will.
--Marvin X
from the Mythology of Pussy and Dick ( A male/female dialogue) by Marvin X, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 2014, approx. 400 pages, $25.00. Pre-order $19.95, includes shipping. Black Bird Press, 339 Lester Ave., Suite 10, Oakland CA 94606.
The Los Angeles Black Book Expo nominates Marvin X to receive the LABBX Spoken Worlds Pavilion Humanitarian Achievement Award of the Year, for unlimited service to the community of Poetry and Spoken Word, educating and enlightening seekers of Truth. For your poignant and insightful works benefiting humanity and for your tireless search for Truth, Justice and Clarity of Thought.
--Denise Lyles-Cook, Director, LABBX Spoken Worlds Pavilion, Hollywood CA
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Black Bird Press News & Review: Saudi Wahhabism and Zionism
Black Bird Press News & Review: Saudi Wahhabism and Zionism
Arab nations back Israel in mass murder of GAZA resistance population: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, some Gulf States, et al. Did not the African ruling class support and benefit from the European slave trade?
Line from a Baraka poem, "The king sold the farmer to the ghost...." Likewise, the reactionary Arab governments don't want to see an independent Palestine, it may signal the coming end of their Uncle Abdullah regimes. Liberty or death is the cry in GAZA as we write! Long live Hamas!
Arab nations back Israel in mass murder of GAZA resistance population: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, some Gulf States, et al. Did not the African ruling class support and benefit from the European slave trade?
Line from a Baraka poem, "The king sold the farmer to the ghost...." Likewise, the reactionary Arab governments don't want to see an independent Palestine, it may signal the coming end of their Uncle Abdullah regimes. Liberty or death is the cry in GAZA as we write! Long live Hamas!
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Order Now: Marvin X's classic manual to recover from the addiction to white supremacy, reprinted
photo by Gene Hazzard
Black Bird Press has reprinted by popular demand, Marvin X's manual (13 steps, based on the AA model) to recover from the addiction to white supremacy. Order directly from the publisher: Black Bird Press, 339 Lester Ave., Suite #10, Oakland CA 94606, $19.95 (free shipping)
By Dr. M
Foreword by Dr. Nathan Hare
Call him Dr. M, as I do, though I’ve known him by other names in other places and, like Diogenes, who went around holding up a lantern to the faces of the people he would meet in the streets of ancient Athens looking for an honest man, I have come to the realization that we as a people have been waiting and looking for somebody like Dr. M to come along for more than half a century, ever since America was stunned by The Mark of Oppression (the Jim Crow era book by two white liberal psychiatrists whose findings had brought them to the heartfelt conclusion that the race of people called “Negroes” was “crushed.”
In only four years after their epitaph was written, Negroes (now called “blacks,” “Blacks,” “Afro-Americans,” “African-Americans,” or as Dr. M sometimes calls them “American Africans”) had exploded in Montgomery with passive resistance. In four more years the “sit-in movement” broke out among the youth, followed like a one-two punch by the so-called “freedom riders” (roving bands of individuals who boarded and defied the segregation of interstate vehicles and included a future student of mine on spring break from Howard University by the name of Stokely Carmichael). Then came “Black Power,” in the context of which I first heard of a man who had metamorphosed from the slave-name Marvin Jackmon into a prominent “North American African poet” who went by the name of Marvin X (the X connoting “the unknown”).
While, despite the fact that I have known him through the intervening years, I cannot unravel every single quality of the brother, I can testify that Dr. M is a brand new Marvin, a Dr. Marvin, a social doctor, if you will, with a gift and a mission for a new black movement. I know this to be true because, aside from my Ph.D. and years of experience in the practice of clinical psychology, I specialized in the study of social movements for a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago. But more than that, I have watched a dedicated Dr. M, up close and clinically, going about his fearless work in the mean streets of San Francisco. Over a period of many months, on many a dark and dreary sometimes rainy Wednesday night, I served as a consultant in clinical psychology to Dr. M’s “Black Reconstruction Group” (the pilot to his twelve-step model now unveiled in this important book on “How to Recover from Addiction to White Supremacy.” In the Recovery Theatre’s pilot groups, I sat with diverse and ad hoc coteries of men and women gathered impromptu in the austere basement of a Catholic church, St. Boniface, located in the heart of The Tenderloin, the highest crime district in San Francisco, just down a few blocks from the famous Glide Memorial Methodist Church. Many a night I marveled at the ease with which Dr. M and his talented co-facilitator, Suzette Celeste brought out trickles of lost and unleashed hope and inspiration in the minds of destitute and degraded street people as well as in the confused and empty psyches of invited members of the black bourgeoisie who, still trying to be unbroken, had come where not many “bourgies” would dare to tread.
On many an appointed night I stood by silently looking on while Dr. M and his collaborators sauntered out into the shadowy mysteries of dilapidated streets to solicit and harness hapless homeless men and a woman or two and bring them in to meet as equals with the anxious representatives of the black bourgeoisie who had dared to cross momentarily back over their tentative territorial and social boundaries. This of course is not recommended for the feeble or the fainthearted; because, until the revolution comes, or the proletariat triumphs, there will be difficulties and perils in chance encounters of the social classes. So I must hasten to explain that a security conscious Dr. M was operating within a safety net of collaborators competent in the martial arts; like Geoffrey Grier, who has been an international martial arts competitor and is a son of a black psychiatrist, Dr. William Grier, coauthor with Dr. Price Cobb of the late 1960s blockbuster, Black Rage.
At the moment when the oppressed have had enough, their rage will explode -- Fanon had warned us in The Wretched of the Earth -- and it is at that moment, at the very point of mental and spiritual coagulation and defeat, when they will come together and rise. Frantz Fanon went on to tell of a category of reconstruction groups called “’djemaas’ (village assemblies) of northern Africa or in the meetings of western Africa, tradition demands that the quarrels which occur in a village should be settled in public. It is communal self-criticism, of course, and with a note of humor, because everybody is relaxed, and because in the last resort we all want the same things. But the more the intellectual imbibes the atmosphere of the people, the more completely he abandons the habits of calculation, of unwonted silence, of mental reservations, and shakes the spirit of concealment. And it is true that already at that level we can say that it spreads its own light and its own reason.”
However, psychiatric authority for a self-help peer group focus on individual feelings (or addiction) in relation to white supremacy became available anew in the late 1960s, when Jeffrey Grier’s father, Dr. William H. Grier, and his collaborator, Dr. Price M. Cobbs, published Black Rage. Dr. Grier has also consulted with Dr. M and his Recovery Theatre around the time of the pilot trial run of the first “Black Reconstruction Groups.” According to Grier and Cobbs, in the “Introduction to the Paperback Edition” of Black Rage, “The most important aspect of therapy with blacks, we are convinced, is that racist mistreatment must be echoed and underlined as a fact, an unfortunate fact, but a most important fact – a part of reality. Dissatisfaction with such mistreatment is to be expected, and one’s resentment should be of appropriate dimensions” among black warriors who would exact retribution. “Psychiatry for such warriors,” Grier and Cobbs went on to explain, should aim to “keep them fit for the duty at hand and healthy enough to enjoy the victories” that are likely to emerge.
Fitness for duty is a pleasant but likely side effect of Dr. M’s “Black Reconstruction Groups” working to free the minds of persons addicted to white supremacy. This no doubt is no doubt why they do not limit themselves in their group sessions to expressions of resentment of racist mistreatment and dissatisfaction but also calmly allow its hidden effects, which often remain unconscious in the way in which the relentless karate chops of white supremacy have killed our dreams on a daily basis and shattered our ability to love, to feel loved, to love ourselves and therefore one another. I listened with much satisfaction as Dr. M and his assemblies delved into the depths of fractured feelings and emotions of the brokenhearted in order to help them come to terms with betrayal, jealousy and rage, in their moving endeavors to learn to love again.
And so it is that you will find many a reference to love in How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy. This includes, for instance, “Women Who Love” and the motivations of the men who love them.
Dr. M’s own fitness for duty is complex, unique and variegated. According to James W. Sweeney, "Marvin walked through the muck and mire of hell and came out clean as white fish and black as coal." Marvin can boast of “a Ph.D. in Negrology,” as he puts it,” the study of nigguhs” issued by the University of Hardknocks’s College of Hell), based on twelve years of research , independent study , and practicum in San Francisco's Tenderloin and other unlettered social laboratories throughout the United States. There may still be hope, if it pleases you, for Dr. M to join the white man’s system of miseducation and mental health care, when we consider that psychologists, including one of my mentors, the late Dr. Carlton Goodlett, at first were “grandfathered” in when the licensure of psychologists was started in the state of California. Later came the oral exam (conversational, not dental), followed in time by an essay exam, before the boom in “standardized “ multiple choice tests for which workshops were offered to prepare you for a fee, causing excellent practitioners, especially black ones, to be blocked from licensure until they found out and forked over whopping workshop fees .
There is also a burgeoning market opening up in “clinical sociology” and “sociological practice” still cutting out its slice of the marketplace and finding its way in matters of licensure and credentialing in the field of sociology. But here it may be important to say that the self-help peer group does not require a sociological or a mental health professional, any more than the primordial AA groups from which the mental health profession has profited and learned. Dr. M is a social “doctor” (which etymologically means “teacher”) grappling with a social problem, white supremacy and its punishing residue in the minds of oppressed black individuals and white oppressors who have chosen to reject and come to places where their fathers lied. Oppressors pure and simple, who accept white supremacy, must be dealt with in a later context, as you will not very well be able to keep them in a Black Reconstruction or White Supremacy Destruction Group (or White Supremacy Deconstruction, if you will).
Much in the manner of Hegel in his essay on “Master and Slave,” Marvin senses that the oppressor distorts his own mind as well as the mind of the oppressed. Hence Type I and Type II White Supremacy Addiction. White sociologists and the late black psychologist, Bobby Wright, converged in their findings of pathological personality traits (“the authoritarian personality” and “the racial psychopathic personality,” as Bobby put it). But if Hegel was correct in his notion that the oppressor cannot free the slave, that the slave must force the oppressor’s hand, then it is Type II White Supremacy Addiction which if not more resistant to cure, must occupy our primary focus. Type II White Supremacy may be seen as a kind of “niggeritis” or “Negrofication” growing out of an over-identification with the master, who is white. As in any disorder severity of symptoms may vary from mild to moderate or severe. As Frantz Fanon put it when he spoke for the brother with jungle fever in Black Skin, White Mask: “I wish to be regarded as white. If I can be loved by the white woman who is loved by the white man, then I am white like the white man; I am a full human being.” In the twisted mental convolution of a brother in black skin behind a white mask, Fanon observed a “Negro dependency complex” independently chronicled in my own Black Anglo Saxons (black individuals with white minds in black bodies). They struggle to look, think, talk and walk white by day, then go to sleep at night and dream that they will wake up white. They refuse to realize that no matter what they may ever do they will never get out of the black race alive.
On the other hand, you are going to be seeing “nouveau blacks” and lesser Afrocentrics -- who faithfully and unquestionably follow twelve-month years and endeavor even to blackenize the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ -- jumping up to question Dr. M’s re-africanization of the “Twelve Steps” model for “using the Eurocentric twelve steps,” but they forget that the very effort to be practical and collective is the original African way. In any event, we must build on whites as whites have built on us, taking the best of the West and leaving the rest alone. But Dr. M has expressly and creatively added a thirteenth step; for his goal is not just recovery but discovery, his goal is not just to change the individual but to change the individual to get ready to change the world.
Meanwhile there is one thing on which we can all agree: in any serious attempt to solve the bitter mental ravages of white supremacy, we must face the unadulterated fact that we are limited when we look to the institutionalized “profession” and their professional “providers.” This of course is not to say that the institutionalized professionals cannot be helpful. Dr. M is quick to point out that a self-help peer group cannot cure all the diverse neuroses and psychoses that afflict us. Indeed he goes so far as to suggest that some of us “may need to be committed.”
The late Queen Mother Moore (who loved to boast that she had “gone as far as the fourth grade, and stayed in school too long to learn anything”) delighted in going around deconstructing our “slave mentalities” and saying somebody needs to “do some surgery on these Negro minds” – in which Queen Mother had diagnosed a chronic condition she called “oppression psychoneurosis.” Queen Mother Moore was basically joking, that is, laughing to keep from crying, but it is no joke that mental health professionals, operating under the medical model, think nothing of seeing a person suffering from a psychosocial problem and not only treating the victim instead of the problem but – much in the manner of any addict or drug pusher– use or apply chemicals and sometimes chemical abuse to deal with the inability of the “patient” to feel good in a bad place and thrive, to try to “have heart” in a heartless world. Many people are unaware to this very day that the practice once was rampant for psychiatrists to treat a person with chronic mental maladies by subjecting them to lobotomies cutting off a portion of their brains. Shock treatment was another method – you’re shocked by life, let’s shock your brain, Senator Eagleton (who later ran for the vice-presidency in the 1970s on the ticket with George McGovern).
It should never have been any surprise that the mental health profession would be of only partial help in reconstructing the psychic consequences of centuries of prolonged brainwashing and subjugation (this is not to mention “Sicko” and what we know of the crippling new effects of “managed care” on the medical profession). Many mental health experts, the overwhelming majority of them white, have long suggested that the “medical model” may be inappropriate in the treatment of the psychological, not to mention, sociological components of mental illness.
But you don’t have to be a mental health professional or a sociologist to know that we can no longer restrict our search for healing to professional shrinks, raring back in executive chairs and carpeted suites stocked with “psychometric instruments” standardized on the white middle class, far removed from the realities of the concrete social milieu of afflicted and homeless black “subjects” living lives of hardship and subjugation, with no assurance of available treatment.
Even when they are “insured they are limited to the care and treatment some insurance clerk is willing to “authorize.” In matters of mental health, this typically will include a few sessions of “fifty minute hours” of “talk therapy” before leaving with a prescription or chemical palliative to dull agony and the pain but not the punishment of life on the skids in a sick society.
The hour is up and time is running out, black people, but white supremacy is not. We are living now in the final and highest stage of racism and white supremacy. We’ve let our struggle slip back while sitting in classrooms and conferences crooning about “afrocentricity” and ancient African glories that have gone forever.
We have come now to a crossroads. We have lost control of our children’s minds, our future. We have lost their respect, and appear to be on a collision course to a war of words between the black generations, in which hip-hop youth disparage and mock our language, our music and our humanity with a creativity and a rime and a rhythm we can’t fathom, let alone equal in our pitifully fruitless endeavors to eliminate the “n-word” and box with the black-on-black random violence of dissocialized youth who have concluded that adults and their leaders cannot or will not fight the power. Who knows but it may be that Dr. M’s movement of recovery from addiction to and from white supremacy is offering us a final and effective chance to begin to “sit down together,” to get together and get our heads together.
Meeting format
for a Pan African mental health peer group to recover from the addiction to white supremacy type II
(Dr. Nathan Hare)
Based on the book by Dr. M (Marvin X) How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy, foreword by Dr. Nathan Hare, afterword by Ptah Allah El (Tracy Mitchell),
Black Bird Press, Oakland CA.
The facilitator should use this format to stay focused in a timely manner, to maintain order and yet allow for the free expression on the people. This meeting is thus a sacred space and time for people to vent and begin the long process of recovery from addiction to white supremacy/lunacy. Anyone can, should and must become a meeting facilitator.
1. Welcome. Welcome to the Pan African Mental Health Peer Group to recover from the addiction to white supremacy/lunacy. My name is ___________________. I am recovering from the adduction to white supremacy.
2. Group response: Hotep, Salaam_________________.
3. I am your facilitator for this meeting. Please join me in prayer and medication, especially for all those persons suffering from the addiction to white supremacy around the world. . I will read the poem What If on page 97 of our text.
4. Definition of White Supremacy: a form of domination and exploitation. White supremacy can be in white face, black face, or any other color, male or female. White supremacy is a drug so pervasive that even when we think we are cured, the ravages and residue appear, affecting our thinking and behavior, social relations and interaction in the home, on the job, at religious worship, social and cultural events. In short, this drug is sometimes tasteless, colorless, yet cunning and vile. We think we are cured, yet a slip of the tongue proves the illness has reappeared, often suddenly without the slightest indication.
5. Will a volunteer please read the Thirteen Steps taken from our text. See table of contents.
6. A telephone list is being circulated; please add your name, address, phone and email. Indicate if you are available to mentor another brother or sister in recovery from white supremacy. Please take numbers if you wish. The telephone is a means of gaining the needed support from each other between meetings. Email also.
7. Donations. It is now time for donations since we cannot support our recovery without the proper finances to sustain the meeting such as rent, printing of literature, refreshments and the like. However, just give what you can.
8. Check-in. The meeting is open for check-in. Please limit your talk to five minutes so everyone gets a chance to share. In this meeting we discourage cross talk. Cross talk is defined as commenting, interrupting, criticizing or giving advice on another person’s share. We need a safe and supportive place to discuss our feelings and cross talk can be very hurtful and humiliating. Thank you. Who would like to begin the check-in?
9. Someone volunteer to read the Step of the present meeting.
10. Speaker. At this time I would like to introduce the speaker who will talk for twenty minutes on the present Step.
11. Discussion. The session is now open for discussion and comments.
12. Closing prayer. Read Step 7, page 78 or any prayer you desire.
13. Next meeting date and any reading assignments.
For more information or to invite Marvin X to establish a Pan African mental health peer group in your community, please call 510-200-4164, email jmarvinx@yahoo.com.
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Book Review: Reginald James takes a peek at Marvin X's (Dr. M) manual for a Pan African Mental Health Peer Group
How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy
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God Gave Noah the Rainbow Sign, No More Water, the Fire Next Time!
U.S. NEWS
07.26.14
Detroit Shuts Off Water to Residen Businesesses Who Owe Millions
DETROIT — In Detroit, even the most basic necessity cannot be taken for granted.
Some 15,000 residential customers have lost water service, and tens of thousands more are in danger of losing it, thanks to past due bills. But businesses owing hundreds of thousands of dollars have not been disconnected, Detroit Water and Sewerage Department records show.
According to a department list, the top 40 commercial and industrial accounts have past-due accounts totaling $9.5 million. That list includes apartment complexes, the Chrysler Group, real estate agencies, a laundromat and even a cemetery.
Meanwhile, stories of residential shutoffs abound. Tangela Harris been doing her best to keep up, but when she was no longer able to work she had trouble stretching her monthly $780 in disability benefits to pay the water bill. So her water service was disconnected. Harris has since come up with $1,100 to have services restored but is having trouble keeping her $180 monthly payment to the water department. On top of that, her home has entered foreclosure because Detroit water bills are rolled into property taxes.
“They can say my house is condemned and take it,” said Harris, 38, a community organizer. “People think we’re not prioritizing, but it’s not that simple when you’re under the poverty level. It’s a different mindset.”
In March, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department announced it was going after deliquent accounts in earnest after a reprieve this past winter. The city is in bankruptcy, after all, and looking for revenue where it can. In March, about half the department’s customers had outstanding balances, meaning they are at least 60 days past due or more than $150 behind. That amounted to $118 million in charges. Through June 30, service was severed to 15,200 customers, and about 92,000 remain in shutoff status.
The $9.5 million owed by non-residents would amount to $625 for each severed customer and $103 for those in shutoff status.
So far, most businesses have been exempt. At the beginning of July, the department issued 10-day shutoff notices to 250 commercial customers. Despite repeated requests, the department was unable to say how many of those, if any, have had their services discontinued. Vargo Golf Co., an Oakland County-based golf course management firm, owes $478,000, while a business called Russell Industrial Associations is more than $181,000 behind.
The $9.5 million owed by non-residents would amount to $625 for each severed customer.
The No. 1 scofflaw isn’t a business but the State of Michigan, which the department said owes more than $5 million. Dave Murray, deputy press secretary for Gov. Rick Snyder (who is sheparding Detroit through the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history) said the bills have been disputed for the last five years over a possible broken water main near the old state fairgrounds in the city limits, which was mothballed several years ago.
“The attorney general’s office has entered into discussions with the City of Detroit, and it would be inappropriate to comment on ongoing negotiations,” Murray said.
Detroit Emergency Manager Bill Nowling said that, particularly among businesses, conflicting accounts of what is owed are not unusual. “What happens is that they dispute them, and there’s a process for regulating disputes. It doesn’t mean they won’t get shut off,” he said.
Kevyn Orr, Detroit’s emergency financial manager, has generally defended the shutoffs, saying payment arrangements can be made. He’s also said many customers have since paid up and have had services restored.
Valerie Blakely hopes she’ll be cut some slack. The Detroit mother of five said she had couldn’t both keep her house warm during one of the worst winters in Michigan history and pay her water bill. When workers recently showed up to disconnect services, she blocked them. They then proceeded to turn off services to nearly every house on her block, she said.
“My neighbors were standing out in the street, unable to cook or do their dishes,” she said, adding that she has about three weeks to pay up, or face another visit by an agency contracted to shut off water.
Rome Adams works for Go Detroit, a community organization that delivers free bottles of water to customers affected by the water department’s crackdown. He said he’s seen pitiful living conditions.
“I feel like they should go after the businesses first, because most of them can afford to pay better than the people,” he said, shaking his head.
More than 500 people rallied in downtown Detroit last week against the disconnections, calling them humanitarian violations. Since then, the department has suspended shutoffs for about two weeks. A caravan from Windsor, Ontario across the river recently delivered a couple of hundred gallons to needy customers.
“This is bad,” Rome said.
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Seattle Blues
The place is Seattle
the place to go
go to Seattle
the place to go
treat a black man right
white girls know what ta do
Nigguh feel like a king
Seattle girls show a nigguh bling bling
Hate this confession
hate to tell the truth
but them white girls in Seatte
treat a nigguh true true true
take care of a nigguh
treat him like a king
Seattle women love dat nigguh
like he ain't never seen.
the place to go
go to Seattle
the place to go
treat a black man right
white girls know what ta do
Nigguh feel like a king
Seattle girls show a nigguh bling bling
Hate this confession
hate to tell the truth
but them white girls in Seatte
treat a nigguh true true true
take care of a nigguh
treat him like a king
Seattle women love dat nigguh
like he ain't never seen.
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Protests at Washington Meeting of African leaders and Parable of the Parrot by Marvin X
WASHINGTON — Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the State Department on Monday, the start of a summit meeting here of more than 40 African heads of state, to denounce some of the leaders as “torturers” and “killers.”
The protesters, who were mostly from Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, said they were angry that the White House was looking to enhance economic ties with repressive governments. “Stop financing dictators,” the crowd chanted. “President Obama, shame on you.”
Obang Metho, director of the Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia, referenced Mr. Obama’s message to African leaders during his 2009 trip. “Africa doesn’t need strongmen. It needs strong institutions,” Mr. Obama said at the time.
“Now he is sitting with strongmen,” Mr. Metho said. “Where are the strong institutions?”
On Tuesday, Mr. Obama will host the leaders at the White House for dinner and will then take part in a series of meetings on Wednesday, mostly focused on increasing United States investment in Africa and promoting peace and stability on the continent. As the summit meeting began, the White House also announced that it would institute new programs and foreign assistance aimed at promoting gender equality in Africa.
The sessions on Monday began with a forum on supporting civil society, and the leaders heard from Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “It’s not possible to succeed for your people unless they have a chance to shape the policies of their government, identify problems and root out injustices and find ways for groups to resolve their differences peacefully,” Mr. Biden said.
Secretary of State John Kerry also addressed the leaders and met one-on-one with Joseph Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of Congo. When Mr. Kerry was in Congo earlier this year, he urged Mr. Kabila to step down after his current term, as Congo’s constitution requires. “Large majorities of Africans support free, accessible and fair elections and limiting their presidents to two terms in office,” Mr. Kerry said Monday.
Protesters outside the State Department said they hoped that the Obama administration would continue to press Mr. Kabila on the term limit.
“Obama must give a clear message that the president doesn’t change the constitution to stay in power,” said Constant Mbala, who moved to the United States from Congo 15 years ago.
The streets between the White House and the State Department were largely absent of traffic on Monday, as Washington residents had been warned of street closings and the likelihood of traffic congestion because of heightened security and the dozens of motorcades that would be driving around town.
African trade officials also convened with their American counterparts on Monday for annual meetings on the African Growth and Opportunity Act. The program, known as AGOA, lowers the tariffs on certain African goods imported to the United States, while countries in Africa are not obligated to lower the duties on any United States goods. It has been credited with helping to diversify and improve other sectors of the African economy, but oil still accounts for three-quarters of the African goods imported by the United States duty free.
The program requires reauthorization by Congress next year, and one of the questions is whether South Africa should continue to benefit from preferential trade status, as some say that its current economic growth means that it should extend a preferential tariff system to some United States goods as well. But while speaking at a luncheon hosted by the National Press Club on Monday, President Jacob Zuma of South Africa dismissed this idea.
“We look forward to a seamless, unconditional and long-term renewal of AGOA...."
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North American Africans Charge USA with Genocide
We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief From a Crime of The United States Government Against the Negro People (1951)
Introduction:
Out of the inhuman black ghettos of American cities, out of the cotton plantations of the South, comes this record of mass slayings on the basis of race, of lives deliberately warped and distorted by the willful creation of conditions making for premature death, poverty and disease., It is a record that calls aloud for condemnation, for an end to these terrible injustices that constitute a daily and ever-increasing violation of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
It is sometimes incorrectly thought that genocide means the complete and definitive destruction of a race or people. The Genocide Convention, however, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948, defines genocide as any killings on the basis of race, or, in it specific words, as “killing members of the group.” Any intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, ethnic or religious group is genocide, according to the Convention. Thus, the Convention states, “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” is genocide as well as “killing members of the group.”
We maintain, therefore, that the oppressed Negro citizens of the United States, segregated, discriminated against and long the target of violence, suffer from genocide as the result of the consistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of government.
The Civil Rights Congress has prepared and submits this petition to the General Assembly of the United Nations on behalf of the Negro people in the interest of peace and democracy, charging the Government of the United States of America with violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
We believe that in issuing this document we are discharging an historic responsibility to the American people, as well as rendering a service of inestimable value to progressive mankind. We speak of the American people because millions of white Americans in the ranks of labor and the middle class, and particularly those who live in the southern states and are often contemptuously called poor whites, are themselves suffering to an ever-greater degree from the consequences of the Jim Crow segregation policy of government in its relations with Negro citrines. We speak of progressive mankind because a policy of discrimination at home must inevitably create racist commodities for export abroad-must inevitably tend toward war.
We have not dealt here with the cruel and inhuman policy of this government toward the people of Puerto Rico. Impoverished and reduced to a semi-literate state through the wanton exploitation and oppression by gigantic American concerns, through the merciless frame-up and imprisonment of hundred of its sons and daughter, this colony of the rulers of the United States reveals in all its stark nakedness the moral bankruptcy of this government and those who control its home and foreign policies.
History has shown that the racist theory of government of the U.S.A. is not the private affair of Americans, but the concern of mankind everywhere.
It is our hope, and we fervently believe that it was the hope and aspiration of every black American whose voice was silenced forever through premature death at the hands of racist-minded hooligans or Klan terrorists, that the truth recorded here will be made known to the world; that it will speak with a tongue of fire loosing an unquenchable moral crusade, the universal response to which will sound the death knell of all racist theories.
We have scrupulously kept within the purview of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which is held to embrace those “acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethical, racial or religious group as such.”
We particularly pray for the most careful reading of this material by those who have always regarded genocide as a term to be used only where the acts of terror evinced an intent to destroy a whole nation. We further submit that this Convention on Genocide is, by virtue of our avowed acceptance of the Covenant of the United Nations, an inseparable part of the law of the United States of America.
According to international law, and according to our own law, the Genocide Convention, as well as the provisions of the United Nations Charter, supersedes, negates and displaces all discriminatory racist law on the books of the United States and the several states.
The Hitler crimes, of awful magnitude, beginning as they did against the heroic Jewish people, finally drenched the world in blood, and left a record of maimed and tortured bodies, and devastated areas such as mankind had never seen before. Justice Robert H. Jackson, who now sits upon the United States Supreme Court bench, described this holocaust to the world in the powerful language with which he opened the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leaders. Every word he voiced against the monstrous Nazi beast applies with equal weight, we believe, to those who are guilty of the crimes herein set forth.
Here we present the documented crimes of federal, state and municipal governments in the United States of America, the dominant nation in the United Nations, against 15,000,000 of its own nationals—the Negro people of the United States. These crimes are of the gravest concern to mankind. The General Assembly of the United Nations, by reason of the United Nations Charter and the Genocide Convention, itself is invested with power to receive this indictment and act on it.
The proof of this face is its action upon the similar complaint of the Government of India against South Africa.
We call upon the United Nations to act and to call the government of the United States to account.
We believe that the test of the basic goals of a foreign policy is inherent in the manner in which a government treats its own nationals and is not to be found in the lofty platitudes that pervade so many treaties or constitutions. The essence lies not in the form, but rather, in the substance.
The Civil Rights Congress is a defender of constitutional liberties, human rights, and of peace. It is the implacable enemy of every creed, philosophy, social system or way of life that denies democratic rights or one iota of human dignity to any human being because of color, creed, nationality or political belief.
We ask all men and women of good will to unite to realize the objective set forth in the summary and prayer concluding this petition. We believe that this program can go far toward ending the threat of a third world war. We believe it can contribute to the establishment of a people’s democracy on a universal scale.
Bit may we add as a final note that the Negro people desire equality of opportunity in this land where their contributions to the economic. Political and social developments have been of splendid proportions and in quality second to none. They will accept nothing less, and continued efforts to force them into the category of second-class citizens through force and violence, through segregation, racist law and an institutionalized oppression, can only end in disaster for those responsible.
Respectfully submitted by the Civil Rights Congress as a service to the peoples of the world, and particularly to the lovers of peace and democracy in the United States of America
William L. Patterson
National Executive Secretary Civil Rights Congress
To the General Assembly of the United Nations:
The responsibility of being the first in history to charge the government of the United States of America with the crime of genocide is not one your petitioners take lightly. The responsibility is particularly grave when citizens must charge their own government with mass murder of its own nationals, with institutionalized oppression and persistent slaughter of the Negro people in the United States on a basis of “race,” a crime abhorred by mankind and prohibited by the conscience of the world as expressed in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948.
Genocide Leads to Fascism and to War
If our duty is unpleasant it is historically necessary both for the welfare of the American people and for the peace of the world. We petition as American patriots, sufficiently anxious to save our countrymen and all mankind from the horrors of war to shoulder a task as painful as it is important. We cannot forget Hitler’s demonstration that genocide at home can become wider massacre abroad, that domestic genocide develops into the larger genocide that is predatory war. The wrongs of which we complain are so much the expression of predatory American reaction and its government that civilization cannot ignore them nor risk their continuance without courting its own destruction. We agree with those members of the General Assembly who declared that genocide is a matter of world concern because its practice imperils world safety.
But if the responsibility of your petitioners is great, it is dwarfed by the responsibility of those guilty of the crime we charge. Seldom in human annals has so iniquitous a conspiracy been so gilded with the trappings of respectability. Seldom has mass murder on the score of “race” been so sanctified by law, so justified by those who demand free elections abroad even as they kill their fellow citizens who demand free elections at home. Never have so many individuals been so ruthlessly destroyed amid many tributes to the sacredness of the individual. The distinctive trait of this genocide is a cant that mouths aphorisms of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence even as it kills.
The genocide of which we complain is as much a fact as gravity. The whole world knows of it. The proof is in every day’s newspapers, in every one’s sight and hearing in these United States. In one form or another it has been practiced for more than three hundred years although never with such sinister implications for the welfare and peace of the world as at present. Its very familiarity disguises its horror. It is a crime so embedded in law, so explained away by specious rationale, so hidden by talk of liberty, that even the conscience of the tender minded is sometimes dulled. Yet the conscience of mankind cannot be beguiled from its duty by the pious phrases and the deadly legal euphemisms with which its perpetrators seek to transform their guilt into high moral purpose.
Killing Members of the Group
Your petitioners will prove that the crime of which we complain is in fact genocide within the terms and meaning of the United Nations Convention providing for the prevention and punishment of this crime. We shall submit evidence, tragically voluminous, of “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group as such,” – in this case the 15,000,000 Negro people of the United States.
We shall submit evidence proving “killing members of the group,” in violation of Article II of the Convention. We cite killings by police, killings by incited gangs, killings at night by masked men, killings always on the basis of “race,” killings by the Ku Klux Klan, that organization which is charted by the several states as a semi-official arm of government and even granted the tax exemptions of a benevolent society.
Our evidence concerns the thousands of Negroes who over the years have been beaten to death on chain gangs and in the back rooms of sheriff’s offices, in the cells of county jails, in precinct police stations and on city streets, who have been framed and murdered by sham legal forms and by a legal bureaucracy. It concerns those Negroes who have been killed, allegedly for failure to say “sir” or tip their hats or move aside quickly enough, or, more often, on trumped up charges of “rape,’” but in reality for trying to vote or otherwise demanding the legal and inalienable rights and privileges of United States citizenship formally guaranteed them by the Constitution of the United States, rights denied them on the basis of “race,” in violation of the Constitution of the United States, the United Nations Charter, and the Genocide Convention.
Economic Genocide
We shall offer proof of economic genocide, or in the words of the Convention, proof of “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part.” We shall prove that such conditions so swell the infant and maternal death rate and the death rate from disease, that the American Negro is deprived, when compared with the remainder of the population of the United States, of eight years of life on the average.
Further we shall show a deliberate national oppression of these 15,000,000 Negro Americans on the basis of “race” to perpetuate these “conditions of life.” Negroes are the last hired and the first fired. They are forced into city ghettos or their rural equivalents. They are segregated legally or through sanctioned violence into filthy, disease-bearing housing, and deprived by law of adequate medical care and education. From birth to death, Negro Americans are humiliated and persecuted, in violation of the Charter and Convention. They are forced by threat of violence and imprisonment into inferior, segregated accommodations, into jim crow busses, jim crow trains, jim crow hospitals, im crow schools, jim crow theaters, jim crow restaurants, jim crow housing, and finally into jim crow cemeteries.
We shall prove that the object of this genocide, as of all genocide, is the perpetuation of economic and political power by the few through the destruction of political protest by the many. Its method is to demoralize and divide an entire nation; its end is to increase the profits and unchallenged control by a reactionary clique. We shall show that those responsible for this crime are not the humble but the so-called great, not the American people but their misleaders, not the convict but the robed judge, not the criminal but the police, not the spontaneous mob but organized terrorists licensed and approved by the state to incite to a Roman holiday.
We shall offer evidence that this genocide is not plotted in the dark but incited over the radio into the ears of millions, urged in the glare of public forums by Senators and Governors. It is offered as an article of faith by powerful political organizations, such as the Dixiecrats, and defended by influential newspapers, all in violation of the Untied Nations charter and the Convention forbidding genocide.
This proof does not come from the enemies of the white supremacists but from their own mouths, their own writings, their political resolutions, their racist laws, and from photographs of their handiwork. Neither Hitler nor Goebbels wrote obscurantist racial incitements more voluminously or viciously than do their American counterparts, nor did such incitements circulate in Nazi mails any more than they do in the mails of the United States.
Through this and other evidence we shall prove this crime of genocide is the result of a massive conspiracy, more deadly in that it is sometimes “understood” rather than expressed, a part of the mores of the ruling class often concealed by euphemisms, but always directed to oppressing the Negro people. Its members are so well-drilled, so rehearsed over the generations, that they can carry out their parts automatically and with a minimum of spoken direction. They have inherited their plot and their business is but to implement it daily so that it works daily. This implementation is sufficiently expressed in decision and statute, in depressed wages, in robbing millions of the vote and millions more of the land, and in countless other political and economic facts, as to reveal definitively the existence of a conspiracy backed by reactionary interests in which are meshed all the organs of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government. It is manifest that a people cannot be consistently killed over the years on the basis of “race” – and more than 10,000 Negroes have so suffered death – cannot be uniformly segregated, despoiled, impoverished, and denied equal protection before the law, unless it is the result of the deliberate, all-pervasive policy of government and those who control it.
Emasculation of Democracy
We shall show, more particularly, how terror, how “killing members of the group,” in violation of Article II of the Genocide Convention, has been used to prevent the Negro people from voting in huge and decisive areas of the United States in which they are the preponderant population, thus dividing the whole American people, emasculating mass movements for democracy and securing the grip of predatory reaction on the federal, state, county and city governments. We shall prove that the crimes of genocide offered for your action and the world’s attention have in fact been incited, a punishable crime under Article III of the Convention, often by such officials as Governors, Senators, Judges and peace officers whose phrases about white supremacy and the necessity of maintaining inviolate a white electorate resulted in bloodshed as surely as more direct incitement.
We shall submit evidence showing the existence of a mass of American law, written as was Hitler’s law solely on the basis of “race,” providing for segregation and otherwise penalizing the Negro people, in violation not only of Articles II and III of the Convention but also in violation of the Charter of the United Nations. Finally we shall offer proof that a conspiracy exists in which the Government of the United States, its Supreme Court, its Congress, it Executive branch, as well as the various state, county and municipal governments, consciously effectuate policies which result I the crime of genocide being consistently and constantly practiced against the Negro people of the United States.
The Negro Petitioners
Many of your petitioners are Negro citizens to whom the charges herein described are not mere words. They are facts felt on our bodies, crimes inflicted on our dignity. We struggle for deliverance, not without pride in our valor, but we warn mankind that our fate is theirs. We solemnly declare that continuance of this American crime against the Negro people of the United States will strengthen those reactionary American forces driving towards World War III as certainly as the unrebuked Nazi genocide against the Jewish people strengthened Hitler in his successful drive to World War II.
We, Negro petitioners whose communities have been laid waste, whose homes have been burned and looted, whose children have been killed, whose women have been raped, have noted with peculiar horror that the genocidal doctrines and actions of the American white supremacists have already been exported to the colored peoples of Asia. We solemnly warn that a nation which practices genocide against its own nationals may not be long deterred, if it has the power, from genocide elsewhere. White supremacy at home makes for colored massacres abroad. Both reveal contempt for human life in a colored skin. Jellied gasoline in Korea and the lynchers’ faggot at home are connected in more ways than that both result in death by fire. The lyncher and the atom bomber are related. The first cannot murder unpunished and unrebuked without so encouraging the latter that the peace of the world and the lives of millions are endangered. Nor is this metaphysics. The tie binding both is economic profit and political control. It was not without significance that it was President Truman who spoke of the possibility of using the atom bomb on the colored peoples of Asia, that it is American statesmen who prate constantly of “Asiatic hordes.”
“Our Humanity Denied and Mocked”
We Negro petitioners protest this genocide as Negroes and we protest it as Americans, as patriots. We know that no American can be truly free while 15,000,000 other Americans are persecuted on the grounds of “race,” that few Americans can e prosperous while 15,000,000 are deliberately pauperized. Our country can never know true democracy while millions of its citizens are denied the vote on the basis of their color.
But above all we protest this genocide as human beings whose very humanity is denied and mocked. We cannot forget that after Congressman Henderson Lovelace Lanham, of Rome, Georgia, speaking in the halls of Congress, called William L. Paterson, one of the leaders of the Negro people, “a God-damned black son-of-bitch,” he added, “We gotta keep the black apes down.” We cannot forget it because this is the animating sentiment of the white supremacists, of a powerful segment of American life. We cannot forget that in many American states it is a crime for a white person to marry a Negro on the racist theory that Negroes are “inherently inferior as an immutable fact of Nature.” The whole institution of segregation, which is training for killing, education for genocide, is based on the Hitler-like theory of the “inherent inferiority of the Negro.” The tragic fact of segregation is the basis for the statement, too often heard after murder, particularly in the South, “Why I think no more of killing a n----r, than of killing a dog.”
We petition in the first instance because we are compelled to speak by the unending slaughter of Negroes. The fact of our ethnic origin, of which we are proud—our ancestors were building the world’s first civilizations 3,000 years before our oppressors emerged from barbarism in the forests of western Europe—is daily made the signal for segregation and murder. There is infinite variety in the cruelty we will catalogue, but each case has the common denominator of racism. This opening statement is not the place to present our evidence in detail. Still, in this summary of what is to be proved, we believe it necessary to show something of the crux of our case, something of the pattern of genocidal murder, the technique of incitement to genocide, and the methods of mass terror.
Our evidence begins with 1945 and continues to the present. It gains in deadliness and in number of cases almost in direct ratio to the surge towards war. We are compelled to hold to this six years span if this document is to be brought into manageable proportions.
The Evidence
There was a time when racist violence had its center in the South. But as the Negro people spread to the north, east and west seeking to escape the southern hell, the violence, impelled in the first instance by economic motives, followed them, its cause also economic. Once most of the violence against Negroes occurred in the countryside, but that was before the Negro emigrations of the twenties and thirties. Now there is not a great American city from New York to Cleveland or Detroit, from Washington, the nation’s capital, to Chicago, from Memphis to Atlanta or Birmingham, form New Orleans to Los Angeles, that is not disgraced by the wanton killing of innocent Negroes. It is no longer a sectional phenomenon.
Once the classic method of lynching was the rope. Now it is the policeman’s bullet. To many an American the police are the government, certainly its most visible representative. We submit that the evidence suggests that the killing of Negroes has become police policy in the United States and that police policy is the most practical expression of government policy.
Our evidence is admittedly incomplete. It is our hope that the United Nations will complete it. Much of the evidence, particularly of violence, was gained from the files of Negro newspapers, from the labor press, from the annual reports of Negro societies and established Negro year books. A list is appended.
But by far the majority of Negro murders are never recorded, never known except to the perpetrators and the bereaved survivors of the victim. Negro men and women leave their homes and are never seen alive again. Sometimes weeks later their bodies, or bodies thought to be their and often horribly mutilated, are found in the woods or washed up on the shore of a river or lake. This is a well known pattern of American culture. In many sections of the country police do not even bother to record the murder of Negroes. Most white newspapers have a policy of not publishing anything concerning murders of Negroes or assaults upon them. These unrecorded deaths are the rule rather than the exception—thus our evidence, though voluminous, is scanty when compared to the actuality.
Causes Celèbres
We Negro petitioners are anxious that the General Assembly know of our tragic causes celèbres, ignored by the American white press but known nevertheless the world over, but we also whish to inform it of the virtually unknown killed almost casually, as an almost incidental aspect of institutionalized murder.
We want the General Assembly to know of Willie McGee, framed on perjured testimony and murdered in Mississippi because the Supreme Court of the United States refused even to examine vital new evidence proving his innocence. But we also want it to know of the two Negro children, James Lewis, Jr., fourteen years old, and Charles Trudell, fifteen, of Natchez, Mississippi who were electrocuted in 1947, after the Supreme Court of the United States refused to intervene.
We want the General Assembly to know of the martyred Martinsville Seven, who died in Virginia’s electric chair for a rape they never committed, in a state that has never executed a white man for that offense. But we want it to know, too, of the eight Negro prisoners who were shot down and murdered on July 11, 1947 at Brunswick, Georgia, because they refused to work in a snake-infested swamp without boots.
We shall inform the Assembly of the Trenton Six, of Paul Washington, the Daniels cousins, Jerry Newsom, Wesley Robert Wells, of Rosalee Ingram, of John Derrick, of Lieutenant Gilbert, of the Columbia, Tennessee destruction, the Freeport slaughter, the Monroe killings—all important cases I which Negroes have been framed on capital charges or have actually been killed. But we want it also to know of the typical and less known—of William Brown, Louisiana farmer, shot in the back and killed when he was out hunting on July 19, 1947 by a white game warden who casually announced his unprovoked crime by saying, “I just shot a n---r. Let his folks know.” The game warden, one Charles Ventrill, was not even charged with the crime.
Sour
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BRIC WILL DUMP US DOLLAR
The Bricso vs. the US Dollar: What will Happen to the Global Economy if BRICS Announce Launch of New Currency?
For several decades, we’ve been told by the mainstream media that the West has a firm grip on the word’s economy and that America decides the future of the world. Peter Koenig, former World Bank economist and Voice of Russia regular, outlines one of the scenarios in which America’s plans for a New World Order are broken. This is the first part of the series about “How to dismate the New World Order”.
by Peter Koenig
Imagine – it is December 31, 2013. The Presidents of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) plus Iran and Venezuela call an impromptu press conference – in Paris – to present a ‘Sea of Change in Economics,’ as they call it. The announcement was circulated throughout the international media and diplomatic offices and embassies just a day before – an indication of urgency. Despite it being the last day of the year with most people thinking of their year-end festivities, the event calls the attention of many – especially the world of finance – and of course the media. The press meeting is planned for 18:00 at the Dolce Chantilly, in Chantilly, just 40 minutes from the center of Paris.
The seven presidents, accompanied by their Ministers of Finance, are seated in a half-moon panel in front of about 500 journalists from all over the world. The Chinese President and General Secretary of the Communist Party, Mr. Xi Jinping, opens the conference without fanfare, introducing the subject as an event that may have worldwide repercussions.
He elaborates, “We the BRICS and some other hydrocarbon producing countries, like Iran and Venezuela – others may join in the future – have decided as of tomorrow – January 1, 2014 – to introduce two new economic measures. First, the BRICS and Iran and Venezuela will launch a new currency, called the Bricso. The Bricso will, at least initially, be a virtual currency; similar to what the Euro was in its initial years of existence and currently the Sucre in the South American trading community of ALBA. The backbone of the Bricso is a basket of moneys of the BRICS and those of Iran and Venezuela. The individual country currencies will be weighed according to their respective economic strength – similar to the Special Drawing Rights – SDR – of the IMF. The initial basket of Seven, does not impede that later other countries, trading partners of the BRICS, may join the Bricso.”
Reality Check comment: One has to wonder: why do it in a sudden almost theatrical manner? The reason is simple: such a move is a declaration of war, an economic war, but a war none the less. Maybe, calling this operation a “revolution” or an “insurrection” would be more appropriate, but the essence remains the same. The West has abused its economic power and used its financial institutions to the detriment of the rest of the world. It was time to turn the tables. When global domination is at stake, it is a good idea to fire the first shot.
“Initially, each country will continue to use its own currency. In the course of the coming years we may decide to also issue the Bricso as a paper currency for all member currencies, similarly to the euro. For now, we believe, each member country will have to adapt its economy to certain established parameters of economic viability – criteria that were not followed seriously enough by the Euro member countries.”
Reality Check comment: This plan has an important technical requirement. The new currency requires a central bank. Actually, BRICS countries are already building an alternative financial system. While kick-starting it into action on short notice is quite hard, using the new mechanisms for clearing the trades done with the new currency is not impossible.
Mr. Jinping went on – “The recently created BRICS Development Bank will initially act as the BRICS Central Bank, issuing guidelines and norms of economic and financial viability, for each member country to adopt, so as to create coherence among them and facilitate trading within, as well as outside the Bricso domain. As our economies evolve, we may consider other steps to adjust to the new dynamics, like – as mentioned before – issuing common paper money. The BRICS Central Bank will also act as a bank of last resource for the member countries, lending to their respective national central banks at inter-bank rates.”
“We have also decided on an initial exchange rate between the US dollar and the Bricso – one Bricso equals 10 US dollars. This is roughly the relation of the outstanding debt – or unmet obligations – in proportion of the respective GDPs – of the US and the combined BRICS.”
Reality Check comment: It doesn’t take a prophet to predict that the western media will describe such a move as an attack on the dollar. Probably, stronger terms like “financial terrorism” are likely to be used. However, it is clear that the mainstream media will always demonize the BRICS countries so there is no point in trying to be “the good guy.” Anyone who disagrees with the NWO will be labeled as an evildoer, tyrant and terrorist. History is written by the winners and if BRICS win this financial war, the leaders of the anti-dollar movement will be hailed as heroes. Given the financial atrocities the West has committed against the world, it is safe to assume that any act aimed at dismantling the existing global financial system is actually an act of self-defense.
A murmur went through the room gaining increasing strength. But before the noise got out of control, President Jinping continued with a raised voice – “The second important step we are announcing – also as of January 1, 2014, the BRICS, Iran and Venezuela will sell their hydrocarbon – primarily oil and gas – in Bricsos, in a newly created Shanghai Oil Bourse. In fact, all countries, oil producers and otherwise, wishing to trade in other currencies than the US dollar may do so at the Shanghai Oil Bourse, or in short the SOB. The reason for abandoning the dollar as an oil trading currency is its volatility. In fact, the dollar has lost its value – and its trust – over the past decades; it is beset by enormous debt and has no real economic backing. Many oil producers see their hydrocarbon wealth at risk.”
“That is all for tonight. I wish you a fun-filled transition into 2014 and a happy New Year.”
Reality Check comment: There is nothing unrealistic about this scenario. Everything could be ready quickly. The oil companies will easily “unwind” their dollar-based contracts and even if they do it gradually, the global oil price is set by the “marginal” (aka “free”) production that is not sold in advance. The same structure can easily work with 3-4 delivery points across the globe in order to ensure a fair, transparent and adequate pricing mechanism for all global producers and consumers.
The presidents and ministers collected their papers and were about to step down from the panel – when the aula exploded in yelling and shouting.
One voice barely pierced the noise on the floor – “What will happen to the US dollar?”- Screamed CNN’s José Perez – “When suddenly a third of the world’s hydrocarbon is traded in – eh – I mean in Bricsos?” – BBC correspondent, Jim Dillen, was afraid that the world economy may collapse. France’s Bernard Betancourt, exclaimed – “Finally a relief from the dollar. But where is the gold? You did not mention it as part of the basket.”
A spokesman of the Nigerian Embassy, who attended the Press Conference, asked simply – “What are we going to do with the worthless dollars in our coffers?”
Mr. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s President, tapped the mike with his pen, attempting to soften the anxiety in the room. As quiet was restored, he said –
“These measures will certainly have an impact on the world economy. To predict exactly what will happen is impossible. Time will tell. But, yes, there will be some collateral damage, especially in those countries that have been relying heavily on the US dollar, on trading with the United States. But it will also affect us, the BRICS. A large proportion of our dollar denominated reserves will be wiped out, as the dollar will undoubtedly plummet – but again, it is difficult to speculate at this time to what extent it will lose its value.”
Reality Check comment: In judo, this is called a sacrifice-throw. Such moves require the thrower to move into a potentially disadvantageous position in order for it to be executed, such as falling to the ground. The momentum of the falling body adds power to the throw and requires comparatively little strength, compared to the effect. Sacrificing a part of currency reserves in order to bring down the American empire is definitely a good strategic move.
Mr. Putin directed his next words at the representative of Nigeria –
“And, Sir, yours too – and that of other countries that have large amounts of US Treasury bonds in their central banks. But, ladies and gentlemen, I predict that this is only a short-lived loss, as we will quickly recover the value of the lost dollars through a stronger and more stable Bricso. To be precise, the artificial and highly inflated value of the US dollar – which in fact, has for decades had no real backing, other than the world’s belief in America’s strength. But by now, most of the world realizes that the only strength that Washington can stand for is brute military force. Its economy depends on wars and conflicts around the world. The US economy is indeed based on destruction – not construction. Accounting for all associated industries and services, way more than 50% of the US GDP consists of the American military industrial and security complex. The rest is consumption of goods made abroad, many of them in the BRICS countries, and of values of services blown out of proportion.”
Reality Check comment: The crucial aspect of this operation is the message sent to the people of the world. The message is about the change of core principles of the global economy. Any change in the global financial system is useless without a proper change of the underlying ideology. For the BRICS to prevail, the professionals working on spreading the right message have to perform brilliantly. The world must see that the whole struggle is not about hijacking the current economic system, but it is about creating an equitable economic system.
Mr. Putin paused into a moment of silence, but then continued before the outbreak of the next barrage of questions – “If America has chosen this way of life – living on debt and high above their means, some 5% of the world’s population is consuming almost 30% of the world’s resources, they may consider that to be their privilege. But it is not, since it has become a burden for the rest of the world – and for our planet. This way of life is quickly depleting the Earth’s resources and destroying the environment by a boundless pillage of unrenewable natural resources and wars.”
And after a reflective pause, Mr. Putin added – “And mind you, not even military action by Washington – lest it be nuclear and suicidal – could stop this bloodless strive for financial and economic justice and equality.
After scanning the audience, he continued –
“In addition, Washington imposes the dollar as the world’s main reserve currency, and money of reference to be used in international trade. As you may know, we the BRICS, as well as some other countries, are already using our own currencies for commercial exchanges and for dealing with commodities. It would be unfair to expect the world to rely on a sheer paper currency that has no backing – and eventually is at the mercy of the United States, for example subject to inhuman sanctions, like the people of Iran is currently suffering – and Iraq in the 1990s. They can be sanctioned because their trading transactions are dollar denominated. We are seeking a fairer, freer world, in which sovereign countries can live peacefully together without the threat of subjugation for not following the dictate of a self-styled empire.”
Reality Check comment: Iran, India, Pakistan and Vietnam are already moving in the right direction. Iran is negotiating with India to trade its hydrocarbons in rubles and yuan. Pakistan is moving towards dropping dollar-denominated trading with China. India and Vietnam are progressively moving towards a close cooperation with the Customs Union of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus in which all members are strongly encouraged to drop the dollar in bilateral trade.
Silence. Mr. Putin looked around the room – into wide-eyed and confused faces. –
“And as far as gold is concerned, yes, you are right. Gold is not in our basket. The value of gold is subject to speculation and manipulation, mostly by Western nations. The highly fluctuating value of gold is the result of speculation, but foremost, the result of fear. When world leaders, mostly westerners, are afraid of their unchecked and wildly uncontrolled economies, they resort to gold, as if gold would be a savior. But the rising value of gold is but a thermometer for a sick economy. The intrinsic value of gold is nothing more than its industrial value. Putting gold into the basket would make the basket, the newBricso, vulnerable to those who will undoubtedly try to speculate with gold, and maybe even revert to the gold standard to save the dollar. Those who are willing to follow the dollar, perhaps under a newly created gold standard are welcome to do so. The BRICS and its affiliated countries are not dependent on that market. Our combined GDP is at least the size of that of the US and much stronger, more solid – it’s based on real, hard production – and what’s more – our countries account for almost 50% of the world population – not a negligible market.”
Reality Check comment:The current huge gold reserves of the West are a direct result of their colonial past and looting of poorer countries. Therefore the repartition of gold reserves has nothing to do with economic strength of the country, only with its proficiency in being a colonial powerhouse in the past. So, gold would be a bad global “currency.”
“And let me add one more caveat – while the Western world sees hydrocarbons as the panacea for energy, their driver for world domination – we know that hydrocarbons, petrol and gas, are just a passing fashion. The future is in renewable sources of energy. For example, the sun is an endless source of energy. Through photo-synthesis it can potentially achieve up to 97% efficiency of solar radiation, for which we will invest in research and development. In the meantime, we also need to refine research into Thorium reactors as an alternative to traditional nuclear power – and investigate sources we are barely aware of that they exist – all around us. But we, the BRICS and those who will associate with us, will put our economic resources into alternative and renewable resources of energy. This will, at once, save the planet, and save humanity from the dependence on those who control the oil.”
Mr. Putin paused – his eyes scanning the room – quiet, full of unasked questions and worried facial expressions. He was compelled to continue, to quench the thirst for more answers, more explanations, since a world that has been living off instant gratification can hardly imagine a long-term solution to saving humanity and the planet.
He continued – “The future is with viable alternative energy sources and we’re working on creating radically cheap energy that will allow us a higher standard of living and a drastically more efficient industry. Our search for better and sustainable energy is a long term proposition. We mustn’t think about the next financial quarter or election cycle, we must think about future generations and start working today for the long term benefits of our children, grandchildren – and their descendants, who have the same right to our planet earth as we do.”
“Tomorrow – or better yet, on January 2, 2014, because tomorrow is a holiday in most of the Western world – we will see the first impact of this economic revolution.”
With these words Mr. Putin stepped away – ignoring the ensuing volley of questions. His colleagues followed.
Reality Check comment: Such an announcement hits the American economy, breaks the morale of the US vassals around the world and it is likely to create a massive panic. The gist of the BRICS’ message is clear: this is the end of the world as we know it.
↧
People need to know there are angels in this world
People need to know there are angels in this world
i mean this must be basic spiritual knowledge
we don't know the beggar on the street is working for God
when we curse the beggar we curse God
surely the Higher Power can come in the guise of a beggar
how will we treat this Higher Power
testing us on the divine personality
really
divine
yet you curse and spit upon the least of these?
no, oh, wretched one
you are not ready for the upper room in my father's house
dwell a little more in the dungeon
taste the cup of wine from the lower world
it is not the taste of honey
it is bitter
not the taste of God
but let the angels come forth
oh, they have been in my life
those who know me know my angels
everyone of them
men and women who loved me unconditionally
who blessed me in the name of God
even when I was wretched and undeserving of such blessings.
Oh, angels, come forth in radical light
let it shine
let it shine
let it shine.
This is a scene from the Retreat to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy Type II. Marvin X facilitated this at his writing retreat in Northern California where he lived in solitude for five years and wrote five books.Dr. Ayodele Nzinga ,left, and Hunia, right, were transformed during this ritual from their addiction to white supremacy type II (Dr. Nathan Hare term)
Yes, these are two angels that have watched over me. And I watched over them as well. Steel sharpens steel! And yes, these are strong warrior women.
My angel was so beautiful
a love beyond this world and the next
unconditional
she gave me her love because she was a lover
lovers love and love and love
let us all be lovers
let us love and love and love
the angels are watching
they record every word I say
they study every word I write
ask them
they will tell you so
they tell me!
--Marvin X
8/6/14
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Part II: People need to know there are angels in the world
Yes, there are angels in the world
some look like bums of the week
Huey Newton was an angel
in the end
looked like a bum of the week
I told him so
in our last meeting
West Oakland crack house
don't talke about Huey
don't say a motherfuckin thang about Huey
He did was God sent him to do
arm the Black Nation when it was the thang ta do
thank you solider
thank you
thank you all the sisters and brothers in the Black Panther Party
thank you for your sacrifice
thank you for taking the blows of the white man off the people
yes, you absorbed the blows that would have gone as whip lashes on the masses.
thank you BPP soldiers, workers,
you gave sweat blood and tears
we love you
in our heart of hearts we love you Black Panther Party
no matter your faults
what about your victories'
feeding the hungry children breakfast
medical clinics
ambulance services for da hood
Black Panther newspaper
Internationalism
Black man on world stage global
Huey with Yasser Arafat, Cho En Lai
Eldridge with General Giap, Kim El Sun
what manner of men were these
so called criminals, global diplomats?
What shit is this?
ghetto nigguhs gone international
It is what it is.
--Marvin X
8/6/14
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More on The Gaza Concentration Camp, Marvin X
Imagine, you live in the Gaza Concentration Camp. A family prison with no outlet to the world by land, air or sea. You are a prisoner in the Big Yard as they call the ghettoes of America, quite similar to the Gaza Concentration Camp. Even when the brothers have the means to leave the hood, they may rent an expansive car, yet they dare not let the enemy catch them out of their turf, so they drive around the block, being sure not to travel beyond their turf.
In Gaza the enemy has dared to occupy and demand demilitarization, which we know is an impossibility.
Let us go to the American civil war in which 200,000 North American Africans took up arms for the cause of America, yet were made to disarm and thus any thought of self determination for North American Africans has been totally useless as per the liberation of our people from post slavery slavery or so called Jim Crow culture after Chattel Slavery outright (personal property slavery).
If two thousand men, women and children had to sacrifice their lives so the Gaza Concentration Camp can be liberated, then such is the price!
Think about all the children in America who are sex slaves like those on Oakland's International Blvd. Don't mention the Bokoo Haram in Nigerian, but think about the children of America as sex slaves, many of them children is foster care. I am trying to unravel the conundrum of life as a foster child, not wanted by father or mother. Was I guilty of child abuse and neglect. During my crack years in the Tenderloin of San Francisco, I used to see a billboard at the bus stop that said if you don't call your child, that is child abuse!
Let us understand all women aren't mothers, all men aren't fathers. How can you be a father or mother if you never had a father and mother? And so we have a situation in the world that is in flux and fluid, while children need simple love.
Baldwin told us the murder of my child will not make your child safe, so think about it. Your children can live only if all children can live, there are no exceptions or exceptionalism.
The Gaza children must have a life along with the children in Israel. But Marcus Garvey told us 100 years ago, no justice no peace. When we hear the Zionists talking about justice and peace, there shall be a true deal in the works for a nation called Palestine.
--Marvin X/El Muhajir
8/6/14
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↧
The day Israel attacked America: USS Liberty, 1967
|
Cover-Up Alleged in Probe of USS Liberty | ||
A former Navy attorney who helped lead the military investigation of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that killed 34 American servicemen says former President Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, ordered that the inquiry conclude the incident was an accident. In a signed affidavit released at a Capitol Hill news conference, retired Capt. Ward Boston said Johnson and McNamara told those heading the Navy's inquiry to "conclude that the attack was a case of 'mistaken identity' despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary." It was “one of the classic all-American cover-ups,” said retired Admiral Thomas Moorer, a former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman who spent a year investigating the attack as part of an independent panel he formed with other former military officials. The panel also included a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins. | Torpedo hole in USS Liberty | |
“Why would our government put Israel’s interests ahead of our own?” Moorer asked from his wheelchair at the news conference. He was chief of naval operations at the time of the attack. Moorer, who has long held that the attack was a deliberate act, wants Congress to investigate. [Newsday] |
Photos of attack on USS LibertyClick images for full sized photos |
Crews mess hall used as an emergency room |
Fifteen years after the attack, an Israeli pilot approached Liberty survivors and then held extensive interviews with former Congressman Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey about his role. According to this senior Israeli lead pilot, he recognized the Liberty as American immediately, so informed his headquarters, and was told to ignore the American flag and continue his attack. He refused to do so and returned to base, where he was arrested. Later, a dual-citizen Israeli major told survivors that he was in an Israeli war room where he heard that pilot's radio report. The attacking pilots and everyone in the Israeli war room knew that they were attacking an American ship, the major said. He recanted the statement only after he received threatening phone calls from Israel. The pilot's protests also were heard by radio monitors in the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon. Then-U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Dwight Porter has confirmed this. Porter told his story to syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak and offered to submit to further questioning by authorities. Unfortunately, no one in the U.S. government has any interest in hearing these first-person accounts of Israeli treachery. [Washington Report] |
Israel attacked the USS Liberty using UNMARKED AIRCRAFT. This is the single fact which proves Israel knew exactly who they were attacking. Israel's story is that they thought USS Liberty was an Egyptian ship and therefore a legitimate target of war. Were that true, there would be no reason to attack a supposedly Egyptian ship with unmarked aircraft. The only possible reason to use unmarked aircraft to attack the ship is that Israel knew it was an American ship and intended to sink it, then to blame the attack on Egypt. Moorer, who as top legal council to the official investigation is in a position to know, agrees that Israel intended to sink the USS Liberty and blame Egypt for it, thus dragging the United States into a war on Israel's behalf. This seems to be a common trick of Israel. Starting with the Lavon affair, through the USS Liberty, to the fake radio transmitter that tricked Reagan into attacking Libya, to potentially 9-11 itself, Israel's game is to frame Arabs and set them up as targets for the United States. The official US investigation is discredited. And with it, every claim of innocence for Israel that relied on the official investigation as a source. The real question facing the American people is why the US Government seems more concerned with protecting Israel after they are caught playing these dirty tricks, rather than doing something to convince Israel not to kill any more Americans.
|
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Thomas Paine's Common Sense
The only thing about common sense is that it is not too common these days.--Dr. Julia Hare, The Black Think Tank, San Francisco
Common Sense (pamphlet)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pamphlet's original cover | |
Author | Thomas Paine |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Published | January 10, 1776 |
Pages | 48 |
Common Sense[1] is a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1775–76 that inspired people in the Thirteen Colonies to declare and fight for independence from Great Britain in the summer of 1776. In clear, simple language it explained the advantages of and the need for immediate independence. It was published anonymously on January 10, 1776, at the beginning of the American Revolution and became an immediate sensation. It was sold and distributed widely and read aloud at taverns and meeting places. Washington had it read to all his troops, which at the time had surrounded the British army in Boston. In proportion to the population of the colonies at that time (2.5 million), it had the largest sale and circulation of any book published in American history.[2]
Common Sense presented the American colonists with an argument for freedom from British rule at a time when the question of whether or not to seek independence was the central issue of the day. Paine wrote and reasoned in a style that common people understood. Forgoing the philosophical and Latin references used by Enlightenment erawriters, he structured Common Sense as if it were a sermon, and relied on Biblical references to make his case to the people.[3] He connected independence with common dissenting Protestant beliefs as a means to present a distinctly American political identity.[4] Historian Gordon S. Wood described Common Sense as "the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era".[5]
Contents
[hide]Publication history
Thomas Paine began writing Common Sense in late 1775 under the working title of Plain Truth. With Benjamin Rush, who helped him edit and publish it and suggested changing the title, Paine developed his ideas into a forty-eight page pamphlet. He published Common Sense anonymously because of its treasonable content. Rush recommended the printer Robert Bell and promised Paine that, where other printers might say no because of the content of the pamphlet, Bell would not hesitate nor delay its printing. Paine and Bell had a falling out, but Bell still felt strongly about printing a second edition. Bell added the phrase "Written by an Englishman" to his second edition without Paine's permission.[6] Paine had stressed that it was "the Doctrine, not the man" that was important. Paine wanted to remain anonymous for as long as possible and felt that even such a general phrase as Bell's addition would take attention away from the ideas in his pamphlet.[6]
That didn't seem to matter, though, because printed by Bell, Common Sense sold almost 100,000 copies in 1776,[7] and according to Paine, 120,000 copies were sold in the first three months. One biographer estimates that 500,000 copies sold in the first year (in both America and Europe – predominantly France and Britain), and another writes that Paine's pamphlet went through twenty-five published editions in the first year alone.[5][8] Aside from the printed pamphlet itself, there were many handwritten summaries and whole copies circulated. At least one newspaper, the Connecticutt Courant, printed the entire pamphlet in its February 19, 1776, issue and there may have been others that did the same.[9] While it is difficult to achieve a fixed figure for the number of circulated copies, what is certain is that Paine's words reached far and wide out to most of America's 2.5 million colonists. His pamphlet was read at countless town meetings and gatherings even to those who could not read.
Paine managed to carefully maintain his anonymity, even during potent newspaper polemics generated by Robert Bell, for nearly three months. His name did not become officially connected with the independence controversy until March 30, 1776.[10] He donated his royalties from Common Sense to George Washington'sContinental Army, saying:
As my wish was to serve an oppressed people, and assist in a just and good cause, I conceived that the honor of it would be promoted by my declining to make even the usual profits of an author.[11]—Thomas Paine
As the controversy with Bell, which only served to fuel the pamphlet's sale and distribution, wore on, Paine publicly repudiated his copyright to give all colonial printers the legal right to issue their own edition.[11]
Sections
Four sections are noted on the title page, which quotes James Thomson's poem, "Liberty" (1735–36):
Man knows no master save creating Heaven,
Or those whom choice and common good ordain.—James Thomson, "Liberty"
I. Of the Origin and Design of Government in general, with concise Remarks on the English Constitution
Paine begins this section by making a distinction between society and government, and then goes on to consider the relationship between government and society in a state of "natural liberty". He next tells a story of a few isolated people living in nature without government, and explains that the people find it easier to live together rather than apart; thus, they create a society. As the society grows, problems arise, and the people meet to make regulations in order to mitigate the problems. As the society continues to grow, a government becomes necessary to enforce these regulations, which over time, turn into laws. Soon, there are so many people within the society that they cannot all gather in one place to make the laws, so they begin holding elections. This, Paine argues, is the best balance between government and society. Having created this model of what the balance should be, Paine goes on to consider the Constitution of the United Kingdom.
Paine finds two tyrannies in the English constitution; monarchical and aristocratic tyranny, in the king and peers, who rule by heredity and contribute nothing to the people. Paine goes on to criticize the English constitution by examining the relationship between the king, the peers, and the commons.
II. Of Monarchy and Hereditary Succession
In the second section Paine considers monarchy first from a biblical perspective, then from a historical perspective. He begins by arguing that all men are equal at creation and, therefore, the distinction between kings and subjects is a false one. Several Bible verses are posed to support this claim. Paine then examines some of the problems that kings and monarchies have caused in the past and concludes:
In England a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year for, and worshipped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.—Thomas Paine[12]
In this section, Paine also attacks one type of "mixed state" – the constitutional monarchy promoted by John Locke in which the powers of government are separated between a Parliament or Congress that makes the laws, and a monarch who executes them. The constitutional monarchy, according to Locke, would limit the powers of the king sufficiently to ensure that the realm would remain lawful rather than easily becoming tyrannical. According to Paine, however, such limits are insufficient. In the mixed state, power will tend to concentrate into the hands of the monarch, permitting him eventually to transcend any limitations placed upon him. Paine questions why the supporters of the mixed state, since they concede that the power of the monarch is dangerous, wish to include a monarch in their scheme of government in the first place.
III. Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs
In the third section Paine examines the hostilities between England and the American colonies and argues that the best course of action is independence. Paine proposes a Continental Charter (or Charter of the United Colonies) that would be an American Magna Carta. Paine writes that a Continental Charter "should come from some intermediate body between the Congress and the people" and outlines a Continental Conference that could draft a Continental Charter.[13] Each colony would hold elections for five representatives. These five would be accompanied by two members of the assembly of colonies, for a total of seven representatives from each colony in the Continental Conference. The Continental Conference would then meet and draft a Continental Charter that would secure “freedom and property to all men, and… the free exercise of religion.”[13] The Continental Charter would also outline a new national government, which Paine thought would take the form of a Congress.
Thomas Paine suggested that a congress may be created in the following way: each colony should be divided in districts; each district would "send a proper number of delegates to Congress".[13] Paine thought that each colony should send at least 30 delegates to Congress, and that the total number of delegates in Congress should be at least 390. The Congress would meet annually, and elect a president. Each colony would be put into a lottery; the president would be elected, by the whole congress, from the delegation of the colony that was selected in the lottery. After a colony was selected, it would be removed from subsequent lotteries until all of the colonies had been selected, at which point the lottery would start anew. Electing a president or passing a law would require three-fifths of the congress.
IV. On the Present Ability of America, with some Miscellaneous Reflections
The fourth section of the pamphlet includes Paine's optimistic view of America's military potential at the time of the revolution. For example, he spends pages describing how colonial shipyards, by using the large amounts of lumber available in the country, could quickly create a navy that could rival the Royal Navy.
Paine's arguments against British rule
- It was absurd for an island to rule a continent.
- America was not a "British nation"; but was composed of influences and peoples from all of Europe.
- Even if Britain were the "mother country" of America, that made her actions all the more horrendous, for no mother would harm her children so brutally.
- Being a part of Britain would drag America into unnecessary European wars, and keep her from the international commerce at which America excelled.
- The distance between the two nations made governing the colonies from England unwieldy. If some wrong were to be petitioned to Parliament, it would take a year before the colonies received a response.
- The New World was discovered shortly before the Reformation. The Puritans believed that God wanted to give them a safe haven from the persecution of British rule.
- Britain ruled the colonies for her own benefit, and did not consider the best interests of the colonists in governing Britain.
Impact
There were at least two reasons why Paine's brief pamphlet is believed to be "the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era".[5] First, while the average colonist was more educated than their European counterpart, European and colonial elites agreed that common people had no place in government or political debates. Common Sense targeted a popular audience and was written in a straightforward and simple way, so Paine's political ideas were made tangible and available to a common audience. This brought average colonists into political debate, which created a whole new political language.[14] Illiterate colonists could hear Common Sense read at public gatherings; thusly, even the uneducated colonist was brought into this new political world. Paine's fresh style of political writing avoided use of complex Latin phrases and instead opted for a more direct, concise style that helped make the information accessible to all. Thus, Paine's "incendiary" words were heard even by those common folk who had never learned to read. The second reason involves the way the vast majority of colonists felt about the idea of independence from British rule. Before Common Sense was published, except for a few radical thinkers the people of the American colonies were "on the fence" about independence. Individuals were in conflict with themselves, and there were those who leaned toward reconciliation with the British crown. George Trevelyan in his History of the American Revolution had this to say about Paine's pamphlet:
It would be difficult to name any human composition which has had an effect at once so instant, so extended and so lasting [...] It was pirated, parodied and imitated, and translated into the language of every country where the new republic had well-wishers. It worked nothing short of miracles and turnedTories into Whigs.[7]
There were those in high places who, while in agreement with Paine's sentiments, voiced criticism of his method. John Adams, who would succeed George Washington to become the new nation's second president, in his Thoughts on Government wrote that Paine's ideal sketched in Common Sense was "so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work".[15] In spite of Adams' formidable influence most people praised Paine's brief booklet. The editors of The Thomas Paine Reader, Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick, in their introduction toCommon Sense wrote:
Published anonymously, Common Sense appeared on Philadelphia streets in January 1776. It was an instant success, and copies of the pamphlet were soon available in all the thirteen colonies. Paine's was an unequivocal call for independence, and many Americans wavering between reconciliation with and independence from Britain were won over to separation by Paine's powerful polemic against monarchy, in general, and theBritish [monarchy], in particular.[16]
The impact of Common Sense was to influence American colonists, both educated and uneducated, to come down from their fences and embrace independence from the British monarchy.[7]
See also
- The Age of Reason and Rights of Man, also written by Thomas Paine
- American philosophy
Notes
- ^ Full title – Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America, on the Following Interesting Subjects.
- ^ Conway (1893).
- ^ Wood (2002), pp. 55-56.
- ^ Anthony J. Di Lorenzo, "Dissenting Protestantism as a Language of Revolution in Thomas Paine's Common Sense" in Eighteenth-Century Thought, Vol. 4, 2009. ISSN 1545-0449.
- ^ ab c Wood (2002), p. 55.
- ^ ab Aldridge (1984), p. 42.
- ^ ab c Foot, Kramnick (1987). p 10.
- ^ Isaac Kramnick, "Introduction," in Thomas Paine, Common Sense (New York: Penguin, 1986), 8
- ^ Aldridge (1984), p. 45.
- ^ Aldridge (1984), p. 43.
- ^ ab Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (New York: Penguin, 2007), 90.
- ^ Paine, Common Sense, excerpted from The Thomas Paine Reader, p. 79
- ^ ab c Paine, Common Sense, 96-97.
- ^ Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976)
- ^ Foot, Kramnick (1987). p 11.
- ^ Foot, Kramnick (1987). p 65.
References
Wikisource has original text related to this article: |
- Paine, Thomas (1986) [1776], Kramnick, Isaac, ed., Common Sense, New York: Penguin Classics, ISBN 0-14-039016-2
- Foot, Michael and Kramnick, Isaac, eds. (1987). The Thomas Paine Reader. Penguin Classics. ISBN 0-14-044496-3
- Liell, Scott. 46 Pages: Tom Paine, Common Sense, and the Turning Point to American Independence. New York: Running Press, 2003.
- Nelson, Craig. Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations. New York: Penguin Books, 2007.
- Conway, Moncure Daniel (1893), The Life of Thomas Paine, Ch. VI.
- Wood, Gordon S. (2002), The American Revolution: A History, New York: Modern Library, ISBN 0-679-64057-6
- Aldridge, A. Owen (1984), Thomas Paine's American ideology, University of Delaware Press, ISBN 0-874-13260-6
External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:Common Sense (pamphlet) |
- "Common Sense: The Rhetoric of Popular Democracy" lesson plan for grades 9-12 from National Endowment for the Humanities
- Common Sense, complete text in various formats with audio
- On Line Full Text Google Books Scan & downloadable PDF
- At ushistory.org
- Project Gutenberg: #147 & #3755
- http://www.scribd.com/doc/23291955/Common-Sense
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Obama's Monsters ball with African butchers and Parable of the Parrot by Marvin X
Obama's monsters ball:
How the White House
opened its doors to
some of Africa's most
evil dictators and homophobes
and turned blind eye to their human rights
record
By 08/06/2014 15:43:00 - Leaders were invited to the White House for the first ever US Africa summit
- Included were dictators and despots with shocking human rights records
- Obama's speech barely acknowledged the oppression rife across Africa
By Corey Charlton and Ted ThornhillPublished: 13:42 EST, 6 August 2014 | Updated: 14:16 EST, 6 August 2014
8View
commentsPresident Barack Obama drew the diplomatic line somewhere at the first ever U.S-Africa summit at the White House this week by not inviting Zimbabwe’s brutal dictator Robert Mugabe.But the guest list still included several other African leaders with only slightly better human rights records.The White House promoted the summit as the largest-ever gathering of African leaders in the United States, with more than 50 countries represented.The red carpet was rolled out for Equatorial Guinea's Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who shot or jailed virtually all his political opponents, Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh, who threatened to ‘cut off the head’ of any homosexuals in the country and for Cameroon’s Paul Biya, who has the dubious honor of ranking 19th on author David Wallechinsky's 2006 list of the world's 20 worst living dictators.The President's opening speech avoided the prickly issues of homophobia and torture and instead sought out similarities between the two continents.He opened with: ‘I stand before you as the president of the United States, a proud American. I also stand before you as the son of a man from Africa’.Before going on to say: ‘Our faith traditions remind us of the inherent dignity of every human being and that our work as nations must be rooted in empathy and compassion for each other, as brothers and as sisters.’Here we run the rule over nine of the most controversial leaders who enjoyed the lavish affair.Equatorial Guinea president Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and his wife Constancia Mangue De Obiang, pictured arriving for a dinner hosted by President Barack Obama for the U.S. Africa Leaders SummitPictured outside the White House waving and grinning with his wife President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea is Africa’s longest serving dictator after seizing power from his uncle and mentor (who used to hang regime critics from the capital’s street lights) in 1979.Since then he has won the yearly elections with 99% of the vote. Taking the lead from his uncle, he has since had shot or jailed virtually all political opponents and ruled the country with an iron fist. Despite running one of sub-Saharas biggest oil-producing countries and amassing a personal wealth in excess of an estimated $600million, he’s far from generous with his riches.The average income of his citizens is $2 a day, few live beyond 53 and 20 per cent of children die before they reach five years of age. Last year the country ranked 163 out of 177 on Transparency International. There is no freedom of the press, the country’s one television station is government-run and clean water is scarce. In 2011, the United States' Department of Justice made moves to seize more than $70 million in assets from President Obiang's son, Teodorin Nguema Obiang Mangue.Justice Department lawyers alleged Nguema, on top of his official government salary of $100,000, used his position to amass more than $100 million through corruption and money laundering, including a $30 million dollar mansion in Malibu, California, a $38.5 million Gulfstream jet and one of the world’s finest Michael Jackson memorabilia collections including the red and black 'Thriller jacket' and Jackson’s crystal-studded 'Bad Tour' glove worth more than $2m. He was also the focus of a corruption investigation in France who seized his 101-room Paris mansion, a collection of cars and other luxury assets. He has repeatedly denied the allegations.President Blaise Compaore (With First Lady Chantal Compaore) of Burkina Faso seized power in a bloody coupBurkina Faso's Blaise Compaore is another African leader who seized power by bloody coup. The Burkina Faso president’s 1987 uprising left his predecessor Thomas Sankara dead – who himself had taken power four years earlier alongside Compaore. In 2011 he watched as protests gave way to calls for his resignation over claims of police brutality and government corruption. However, his presidential guard eventually squashed a mutiny, then made concessions to appease the remaining protestors - but questions remain over corruption among the ruling elite.Cameroon president Paul Biya (with his wife Chantal Vigouroux) pictured at the President Obama's summit yesterdayPaul Biya has the dubious honour of ranking nineteenth on author David Wallechinsky's 2006 list of the world's 20 worst living dictators. The Cameroon's grip on his country's presidency has remained tight since he came to power in 1983 and there have been widespread allegations of fraud and voting consistencies in every election cycle. In fact, Mr Wallechinsky claims in the Huffington Post Biya is credited with the innovative election fraud tactic of paying for a set of international observers to certify his elections as legitimate.Angolan president Jose Eduardo dos Santos (in Japan) Human rights groups claim his government has murdered manyHuman rights groups claim Angolan president Jose Eduardo do Santos has murdered many and exploited the country's resources to his own gain. After Mariah Carey was paid $1million for performing for him last year, Human .Rights Foundation president Thor Halvorssen said: 'It is the sad spectacle of an international artist purchased by a ruthless police state to entertain and whitewash the father-daughter kleptocracy that has amassed billions in ill-gotten wealth while the majority of Angola lives on less than $2 a day'President of Gambia Yahya Jammeh (with his wife, First Lady Zineb Jammeh) attended the dinner at the White HouseGambian president Yahya Jammeh took power in a military coup in 1994. Although the coup itself was bloodless, in the 20 years since he has been accused of countless breaches of human rights. In 2008, he threatened to 'cut off the head' of any homosexuals in the country. The following year, it was reported up to 1,000 Gambians had been abducted by the government on charges of witchcraft - they were taken to prisons and forced to drink poison.
- Leaders were invited to the White House for the first ever US Africa summit
- Included were dictators and despots with shocking human rights records
- Obama's speech barely acknowledged the oppression rife across Africa
By Corey Charlton and Ted Thornhill
Published: 13:42 EST, 6 August 2014 | Updated: 14:16 EST, 6 August 2014
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President Barack Obama drew the diplomatic line somewhere at the first ever U.S-Africa summit at the White House this week by not inviting Zimbabwe’s brutal dictator Robert Mugabe.
But the guest list still included several other African leaders with only slightly better human rights records.
The White House promoted the summit as the largest-ever gathering of African leaders in the United States, with more than 50 countries represented.
The red carpet was rolled out for Equatorial Guinea's Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who shot or jailed virtually all his political opponents, Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh, who threatened to ‘cut off the head’ of any homosexuals in the country and for Cameroon’s Paul Biya, who has the dubious honor of ranking 19th on author David Wallechinsky's 2006 list of the world's 20 worst living dictators.
The President's opening speech avoided the prickly issues of homophobia and torture and instead sought out similarities between the two continents.
He opened with: ‘I stand before you as the president of the United States, a proud American. I also stand before you as the son of a man from Africa’.
Before going on to say: ‘Our faith traditions remind us of the inherent dignity of every human being and that our work as nations must be rooted in empathy and compassion for each other, as brothers and as sisters.’
Here we run the rule over nine of the most controversial leaders who enjoyed the lavish affair.
Equatorial Guinea president Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and his wife Constancia Mangue De Obiang, pictured arriving for a dinner hosted by President Barack Obama for the U.S. Africa Leaders Summit
Pictured outside the White House waving and grinning with his wife President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea is Africa’s longest serving dictator after seizing power from his uncle and mentor (who used to hang regime critics from the capital’s street lights) in 1979.
Since then he has won the yearly elections with 99% of the vote. Taking the lead from his uncle, he has since had shot or jailed virtually all political opponents and ruled the country with an iron fist. Despite running one of sub-Saharas biggest oil-producing countries and amassing a personal wealth in excess of an estimated $600million, he’s far from generous with his riches.
The average income of his citizens is $2 a day, few live beyond 53 and 20 per cent of children die before they reach five years of age. Last year the country ranked 163 out of 177 on Transparency International. There is no freedom of the press, the country’s one television station is government-run and clean water is scarce. In 2011, the United States' Department of Justice made moves to seize more than $70 million in assets from President Obiang's son, Teodorin Nguema Obiang Mangue.
Justice Department lawyers alleged Nguema, on top of his official government salary of $100,000, used his position to amass more than $100 million through corruption and money laundering, including a $30 million dollar mansion in Malibu, California, a $38.5 million Gulfstream jet and one of the world’s finest Michael Jackson memorabilia collections including the red and black 'Thriller jacket' and Jackson’s crystal-studded 'Bad Tour' glove worth more than $2m. He was also the focus of a corruption investigation in France who seized his 101-room Paris mansion, a collection of cars and other luxury assets. He has repeatedly denied the allegations.
President Blaise Compaore (With First Lady Chantal Compaore) of Burkina Faso seized power in a bloody coup
Burkina Faso's Blaise Compaore is another African leader who seized power by bloody coup. The Burkina Faso president’s 1987 uprising left his predecessor Thomas Sankara dead – who himself had taken power four years earlier alongside Compaore. In 2011 he watched as protests gave way to calls for his resignation over claims of police brutality and government corruption. However, his presidential guard eventually squashed a mutiny, then made concessions to appease the remaining protestors - but questions remain over corruption among the ruling elite.
Cameroon president Paul Biya (with his wife Chantal Vigouroux) pictured at the President Obama's summit yesterday
Paul Biya has the dubious honour of ranking nineteenth on author David Wallechinsky's 2006 list of the world's 20 worst living dictators. The Cameroon's grip on his country's presidency has remained tight since he came to power in 1983 and there have been widespread allegations of fraud and voting consistencies in every election cycle. In fact, Mr Wallechinsky claims in the Huffington Post Biya is credited with the innovative election fraud tactic of paying for a set of international observers to certify his elections as legitimate.
Angolan president Jose Eduardo dos Santos (in Japan) Human rights groups claim his government has murdered many
Human rights groups claim Angolan president Jose Eduardo do Santos has murdered many and exploited the country's resources to his own gain. After Mariah Carey was paid $1million for performing for him last year, Human .Rights Foundation president Thor Halvorssen said: 'It is the sad spectacle of an international artist purchased by a ruthless police state to entertain and whitewash the father-daughter kleptocracy that has amassed billions in ill-gotten wealth while the majority of Angola lives on less than $2 a day'
President of Gambia Yahya Jammeh (with his wife, First Lady Zineb Jammeh) attended the dinner at the White House
Gambian president Yahya Jammeh took power in a military coup in 1994. Although the coup itself was bloodless, in the 20 years since he has been accused of countless breaches of human rights. In 2008, he threatened to 'cut off the head' of any homosexuals in the country. The following year, it was reported up to 1,000 Gambians had been abducted by the government on charges of witchcraft - they were taken to prisons and forced to drink poison.
'I STAND BEFORE YOU AS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND A PROUD AMERICAN. I ALSO STAND BEFORE YOU AS THE SON OF A MAN FROM AFRICA: PRESIDENT OBAMA’S SPEECH
Parable of the Parrot by Marvin X
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Dr. Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Forty years of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
By Nigel WestmaasPambazuka News, June 14, 2012
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Every now and then in history a scholarly enterprise emerges that breaks new ground and provokes an impact that exceeds the confines of narrow academia. Walter Rodney’s seminal work in combination with his other projects performed precisely this function for Africa and beyond.
Its publication and reception exemplified the strains and fissures in the scholarship focused on the continent at the time. It would go on to become one of the most influential books in the “Third World.”
When it emerged in 1972 the book was hailed in Dar-es-Salaam as “probably the greatest book event in Africa since Frantz Fanon.” Wole Soyinka, the African novelist went further. He suggested that Rodney was one of the first “solidly ideologically situated intellectuals ever to look colonialism and exploitation in the eye and where necessary, spit in it.”
The book’s publication led to a veritable revolution in the teaching of African history in the universities and schools in Africa, the Caribbean and North America. Its content became contagious and was an element in the developing world historical sociology stream in embryo in the USA in the 1970s – more specifically the “world systems analysis’ framework. Rodney’s doctoral thesis – A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, had earlier set the parameters and standard for this later decisive intervention in African historiography.
Rodney compiled How Europe Underdeveloped Africa from extensive archival research systematically identifying causes and outcome of the historical turbulence on the African continent. In doing so he identified the world capitalist system, both mercantile and modern, as the principal agency of underdevelopment of the African continent for over five centuries. The book covers a wide range: an introductory discussion on the concepts “development and underdevelopment;” the state of Africa prior to European entry; Africa’s contribution to capitalist development; the effects of colonial education and impact of missionary activity; the collective nature of African organisation; and of course the exploitation of African resources during the colonial era and consequent “underdevelopment.”
Africa’s contribution to European capitalist development
According to Rodney, Europeans went through several phases of desire in Africa: first it was gold, through ivory and camwood to human cargo (slavery). He sketches the slow conquest and penetration due to shipping superiority and the slow breakup of African kingdoms and states in the 16th-17th century leading to the Portuguese slave trade and decision-making role for Europeans in Africa. While dissecting the slave trade he drew parallels between the rise of the European seaport towns of Bristol, Liverpool, Nantes, Seville and the Atlantic slave trade.
In a passage that vividly explains the impact of Europe on Africa and its subsequent underdevelopment Rodney asserted that:
Rodney pursues the notion that colonisation gave Europe a technological edge and addresses the exploitation of African minerals important for making steel alloys, manganese and chrome, including columbite – critical for aircraft engines. Significantly, in the course of this orbit of exploitation there was incessant African resistance. But European firearms, after reaching a certain phase of effectiveness, as in the use of the Maxim (machine gun) against the Maji Maji and the Zulus and others, in concert with the use of Africans in colonial armies tipped the military balance in favour of Europe and subjugated a continent.
Unilever, Firestone and the exploitation of a continent
Throughout the text Rodney provides compelling evidence of European greed, naming traders and businessmen whose titles would later became associated with global conglomerates. David and Alexander Barclay were 18th century slave traders who Rodney said were “engaging in the slave trade… and who later used the loot to set up Barclays bank.” Today Barclays is one of the most powerful banks in the world yet its website sanitizes its past role with little or no acknowledgement that its founding profits stemmed from the African slave trade.
Contemporary corporate culture with its beneficent public relations outlook took generations to perfect. As Rodney eloquently describes, there was a point in time when colonialists and settlers held nothing back in their language of domination. Colonel Grogan, a white settler in Kenya, bluntly said of the Kikuyu: “We have stolen his land. Now we must steal his limbs. Compulsory labour is the corollary of our occupation of the country.”
Rodney also attacks the notion, which unfortunately still persists, that there is some universal nexus or equal relationship between “hard work” and great wealth, a myth peddled in the West today. In his tome Rodney swats away this “common myth within capitalist thought that the individual through hard work can become a capitalist.”
In like vein Rodney connects America to the exploitation of Africa, especially with the links between the Firestone company and Liberian rubber. According to Rodney, “between 1940 and 1965 Firestone took 160 million dollars worth of rubber out of Liberia; while in return the Liberian government received 8 million dollars.”
He traces the evolution of companies like Unilever as major beneficiaries of the exploitation of the African continent. Beginning with soap, William Lever began to produce Lifebuoy, Lux and Vim and margarine. A merger in 1929-30 resulted in Unilever taking its current title and expanding with the material coming from products such as copra, groundnut oil, palm oil, and oils and the fats of animals. Today Unilever is one of the biggest corporations in the world now responsible for everyday indispensable brand name products such as Dove, Closeup toothpaste, Lipton’s tea, Q tips, Vaseline, Cutex, Slimfast, Klondike, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Ponds, Sunlight, Breeze, and Vim of old.
Criticisms
Even as How Europe Underdeveloped Africa struck a chord among many academics, students and general readership on several continents it has been subjected to several critiques over time. It is certainly evident that the text is short on gender analyses and the role of women – only a few pages bear on women in Africa and the context of their exploitation and resistance.
One critic suggested that despite its pretensions to be Marxist analysis the text actually fails on that count. This critique explains that How Europe Underdeveloped Africa “fails because it tries to persuade an African audience of the relevance of dependence theory by making it mesh with the simplistic version of the past already popularised by nationalist historians.”
Another critic, Caroline Neade, argues that Rodney identified Africa as “passive victim” of European colonization. But there is a lot in the book which would render this criticism unfair. Rodney quite conspicuously emphasised African technological development at a given point in history prior to European intervention and African resistance to European penetration is given vigorous treatment and agency in the text.
Other scholars generally sympathetic with Rodney nonetheless find fault with some of his other arguments. Lansine Kaba for example, whilst hailing the importance of the work for African scholarship, is critical of the “sweeping generalization” and placement of Sudanic kingdoms as feudal states and Rodney’s description of traditional African economies as subsistence economies. Similarly, others have decried Rodney’s 1972 book as too “polemical.”
Yet Rodney was the non-traditional historian and “polemic” that reached a wider, popular audience was essentially his goal. In his own words Rodney declared that the main purpose of the text was to “try to reach Africans who wish to explore further the nature of their exploitation rather than to satisfy the “standards” set by our oppressors and their spokesmen in the academic world.”
Living history and Rodney’s method
One of the more important themes that distinguished Rodney as an historian with a difference was the issue of “living history” a concept apparent in the methodology of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Rodney explains:
Rodney’s productive and activist zeal for history is well established. Andaiye reflected on his propensity for writing: “He wrote everywhere – in the car if he wasn’t driving, standing on the street corner, on the stelling waiting to board the Berbice ferry, waiting for public meetings to begin in Linden, on the Corentyne, in Leonora, in Buxton, often surrounded by police.” This anecdote gives an indication of the type of historian Rodney was: a living breathing embodiment of the seamless collusion between work and activism, people’s causes and the use of history as clarification and intellectual armour and not restricted to an inert academic excursion.
This makes Rodney one of the main critics of the positivist tradition in historiography. The positivists consider humanities or the natural and social sciences as solely derived from sensory experience. Consequently, the logical and mathematical treatment of any data is seen as exclusive and authentic. Positivism, which prevailed in the humanities, and in the social and natural sciences, remained dominant until historians like Rodney, the feminist movement and oral history advocates among others punctured its limitations and pretensions.
Rodney’s book today
After Rodney’s assassination in 1980 his work continued to grip the imagination of Third World and Pan-African scholarship. Evidence of the book’s lasting value is the fact that at least eight editions have been published over time. Furthermore it is still widely utilised, even with academic challenges to its content, as a critical reference point on the historiography of Africa.
But there is still difficult road ahead as memories are short even in the age of express communication. More and more we are hearing from young people in Guyana, the Caribbean and Africa, who, on being introduced to his life and work typically come up with the refrain: “Who is Rodney?”
Issa Shivji, Professor of Law at Dar University placed this amnesia in context as he reflects on today’s reality. During Rodney’s time, he said, “we swore by wafanya kazi na wakulima (workers and peasants); now we all aspire to become wawekezaji na walaji (investors and consumers). Or more correctly wakala na wawekezaji (investors’ agents or compradors).”
In the final analysis, for the Guyanese historian, writing and activism was a strategic and heartfelt response to the need for history, while maintaining academic rigour, to break with certain conservative traditions. In other words, history was a liberating tool. Like Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains one of the most compelling and persuasive books to emerge from the bowels of critical resistance to the exploitation of small countries.
If Rodney were to rewrite How Europe Underdeveloped Africa he would doubtless, given the scholar within, reconfigure sections, tighten certain arguments and perfect the narrative. But his overall thesis would stand. The overt fangs that slave traders and corporate giants like Barclays, Unilever and Firestone openly displayed in early profiteering and exploitation of the continent have been replaced by charming corporate public relations smiles and handouts.
Yet the profits sequestered from Africa over several centuries, as effectively argued by Rodney, still stand as a foremost if not exclusive source and substance of Africa’s underdevelopment. In short, Europe and North America assisted substantially in the rape and underdevelopment of a continent rich in human and natural resources.
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Black Bird Press News & Review: Abstract for the Black Arts Movement 27 City Tour of the BAM Poet's Choir and Arkestra
Black Bird Press News & Review: Abstract for the Black Arts Movement 27 City Tour of the BAM Poet's Choir and Arkestra
Worked with Marvin X at his Black Educational Theatre, San Francisco, 1972
Ed Bullins, playwright, cofounder with Marvin X of Black Arts West Theatre, San Francisco, 1966, the Black House, 1967, with Marvin and Eldridge Cleaver. Ed invited Marvin X to work with him at the New Lafayette Theatre in Harlem NY, 1968. Marvin was associate editor of Black Theatre Magazine, a publication of the New Lafayette Theatre.
Godfather, Ancestor, Amiri Baraka
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Coming soon from Third World Press: Black Hollywood unchained, an anthology edited by Ishmael Reed
In Black Hollywood Unchained, Ishmael Reed gathers an impressive group of scholars, critics, intellectuals, and artist to examine and respond to the contemporary portrayals of Blacks in films. Using the 2012 release of the film Django Unchained as the focal point of much of the discussion, these essays and reviews provide a critical perspective on the challenges facing filmmakers and actors when confronted with issues on race and the historical portrayal of African American characters. Reed also addresses the black community’s perceptiveness as discerning and responsible consumers of film, theatre, art, and music. Contributors to this collection are: Jill Nelson, Amiri Baraka, Cecil Brown, Halifu Osumare, Houston A. Baker, Tony Medina, Herb Boyd, Jerry Ward, Ruth Elizabeth Burks, Art Burton, Justin Desmangles, Jesse Douglass, Jack Foley, Joyce A. Joyce, C. Leigh McInnis, Heather Russell, Harriette Surovell, Kathryn Takara, Al Young and Marvin X.
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World News in Review
News Updates from CLG
9 August 2014
http://www.legitgov.org/
All links are here:http://www.legitgov.org/#breaking_news
All links are here:http://www.legitgov.org/#breaking_news
Previous edition: U.S. Airstrikes in Iraq Have Begun - Reports. Google subscribers: Google Filter Instructions for CLG Newsletter.
First, al-CIAduh. Now, I-CIA-SIS: U.S. trained militants who joined ISIS --Secret Jordan base was site of covert aid to 'rebels' targeting Assad 17 June 2014 Syrian rebels who would later join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, were trained in 2012 by U.S. instructors working at a secret base in Jordan, according to informed Jordanian officials. The officials said dozens of future ISIS members were trained at the time as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria...Last March, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported Americans were training Syrian rebels in Jordan.
U.S. Jets and Drones Used to Attack in Iraq 8 Aug 2014 The United States launched a series of airstrikes against Sunni militants in northern Iraq on Friday, using Predator drones and Navy F-18 fighter jets to destroy rebel positions around the city of Erbil, the American military said Friday. The action marked the return of the United States to a direct combat role in a country it left in 2011. Warplanes dropped 500-pound laser-guided bombs on a number of targets: a mobile artillery piece that was being towed from a truck and had begun shelling Erbil, a stationary [?] convoy of seven vehicles, and a mortar position.
U.S. Drops Food and Water to Trapped Iraqis for Second Day 8 Aug 2014 U.S. military aircraft dropped a second air drop of humanitarian aid to Iraqis under threat from hardline militants in northern Iraq for the second straight night, the Pentagon said on Friday. Three planes dropped 72 bundles of supplies for the refugees, according to Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby, who spoke from New Delhi. Included in the aid were more than 28,000 meals and more than 1,500 gallons of water. [Yes, the US gets water to people 'stranded and thirsty' on an Iraq mountain, due to ISIL. Too bad Detroit isn't in Iraq, as an 'ISIL' govt shut off Detroit's water. --LRP]
FAA bans commercial airlines from flying over Iraq as U.S. bombing missions begin--Authorities announced the ban Friday morning only hours after the Pentagon confirmed two U.S. bombs were dropped over northern Iraq --Two 500-pound, laser-guided bombs were dropped on 'enemy artillery equipment' Friday morning near the Kurdish capital or Erdil - Pentagon 8 Aug 2014 Federal aviation authorities are prohibiting U.S. airlines and other commercial carriers from flying over Iraq as U.S. bombing missions begin. The FAA announced the ban Friday, citing the 'potentially hazardous situation' created by fighting between militants and Iraqi security forces and their allies as U.S. military planes begin strategic airstrikes against the Islamic State. The ban applies to all U.S.-registered planes except those operated by foreign carriers and to FAA-licensed pilots and comes only one day after President Obama authorized the attacks.
US military launches two new rounds of bombings in Iraq 8 Aug 2014 The United States launched a second round of airstrikes on targets near Irbil, Iraq Friday, taking out two Islamic militant mortar positions and a seven-vehicle convoy, a Pentagon official said. The new action came just hours after American fighter jets launched a first round of strikes and one day after President Obama authorized military action to protect U.S. personnel and Iraqi civilians. Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby said the U.S. launched the second round of two airstrikes to help defend Irbil, where U.S. personnel are "assisting the government of Iraq."
Car bomb in Iraq's capital kills 17 7 Aug 2014 At least 17 people, including six Iraqi policemen, have been killed in a powerful car bomb attack on a police checkpoint in the Iraqi capital city of Baghdad. According to Iraqi security sources, the deadly incident took place in the holy town of Kadhimiya, located in a northern neighborhood of Baghdad, on Thursday. Thirty-one people also suffered injuries in the incident.
Rockets, Airstrikes After Gaza War Truce Collapses --More than 1,900 Gazans have been killed in the four-week war, roughly three-quarters of them civilians, according to Palestinian and United Nations officials. 9 Aug 2014 Israeli airstrikes struck more than 20 targets Saturday in the Gaza Strip as militant rocket fire continued toward Israel following the collapse of a three-day truce aimed at ending the war between Israel and Hamas...Hamas officials said the Israel airstrikes Saturday hit houses, mosques, its warehouses and training sites. A handful of rockets landed Saturday morning in Israel.
Israel detains over 1,000 anti-war Palestinians 8 Aug 2014 Latest figures show Israeli forces have arrested more than a thousand Palestinians protesting against Tel Aviv's aerial and ground attacks on the besieged Gaza Strip. Sources said the activists were detained during the crackdown on towns of Palestinian Arab population across Israel. Israeli media outlets have cited a lawyer representing some of the arrested people as saying that dozens of them are being held without charge.
Russia 'already turning away trucks at border' --Afrucat says Russian importers started cancelling orders from EU suppliers this morning 7 Aug 2014 Catalan producer association Afrucat is urging its members not to send lorries to Russia until the situation regarding the ban on EU imports has been fully clarified, following reports that trucks laden with fruits and vegetables are already being refused entry at border crossings.
WHO declares Ebola an international health emergency 8 Aug 2014 The world's worst outbreak of Ebola that has killed nearly 1,000 people in West Africa represents an international health emergency and could continue spreading for months, the World Health Organization said on Friday. "The outbreak is moving faster than we can control it," WHO Director-General Margaret Chan told reporters on a telephone briefing from her Geneva headquarters. The U.N. agency said all states where Ebola had passed from one person to another should declare a national emergency.
Toronto-area hospital treating traveler with flu-like symptoms - TV 8 Aug 2014 A Toronto-area hospital is treating a patient with fever and flu-like symptoms who recently visited Nigeria, where a state of emergency has been declared over the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. CBC News said on Friday that the patient has been isolated at the Brampton, Ontario, hospital, as a precautionary measure.
U.S. orders diplomats' families to leave Liberia as Ebola spreads to fifth country 7 Aug 2014 The director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday he has activated the agency's emergency operation center at the highest response level to help respond to the worst Ebola outbreak in history, which has killed 932 people. In testimony at a special congressional hearing on Ebola, CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden said the centers have more than 200 staff members in Atlanta working on the outbreak, and will soon have more than 50 disease experts in West Africa to try to contain the outbreak...The United States ordered families of its diplomats in Liberia to leave and warned against non-essential travel to the West African country because of the growing Ebola outbreak.
First European Ebola patient admitted to Madrid hospital 7 Aug 2014 The first European victim [Priest Miguel Pajares, 75,] of the West African Ebola outbreak arrived in Spain on Thursday morning and was rushed to a Madrid hospital, officials said, as hopes rose that a US experimental vaccine could soon be available for wider treatment. The pair [Pajares and colleague, Sister Juliana Bohi] landed amid high security at a military air base near the capital and were transferred into ambulances on stretchers enclosed in transparent tents, pushed by medical staff wearing protective suits. They were then taken to La Paz hospital accompanied by a police escort.
6 people tested for Ebola in US - report 5 Aug 2014 As health officials downplay concerns about an Ebola outbreak in the US, six people have been quietly tested across the country for the deadly virus, according to a report. In addition to patients isolated in New York, Atlanta and Ohio, there were six other patients tested without the public's knowledge, according to a CNN report. The tests were negative.
Fears that tiger mosquito could spread dengue in France 7 Aug 2014 Doctors on the French Riviera have treated 17 people for dengue fever and chikungunya this year, amid fears that a decade-long invasion of Asian tiger mosquitoes in the region could spread the tropical diseases. Four of the patients had dengue fever and 11 contracted chikungunya. The presence of Asian tiger mosquitoes in France is proving a big concern to health services because unlike native species they are able to transmit both dengue and chikungunya.
Death of James Brady, Reagan press secretary, ruled a homicide 08 Aug 2014 A medical examiner has ruled the recent death of former White House press secretary James Brady, who was wounded in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, a homicide, raising the possibility John Hinckley Jr. could be charged with murder. Members of the Metropolitan Police Department's Homicide Branch, the United States Attorney's Office, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are reviewing the case, according to a police press release issued Friday.
Blind Man Attacked and Robbed in Hartford, Guide Dog Knocked Unconscious 8 Aug 2014 Hartford police are searching for the three young men sociopaths they say attacked and robbed a blind man and knocked his guide dog unconscious last weekend. Francis Shannon, of Sigourney Street in Hartford, was walking his guide dog, Lady, near his home around midnight Aug. 2 when three men attacked and robbed him, according to police. Shannon suffered minor injuries, and the attackers threatened to hurt him further if he reported the incident to police. He was afraid for his safety and didn't contact authorities right away.
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