BAR 5 September 2012: What Obama Has Wrought / Dem’s True Colors / Dubois: Why I Won’t Vote

5 September 2012 — Black Agenda Report - News, commentary and analysis from the black left

What Obama Has Wrought

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
The meticulously scripted spectacles of the two corporate party conventions are very poor backdrops for clear thinking – but luckily, the ordeals are almost over. What remains after the tents are folded, are the crimes of this administration and its predecessor: both horrifically evil in their own ways. History will mark Obama as the more effective evil, mainly because of the lack of opposition.

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Freedom Rider: Democrats Show Their True Colors

 
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
The Democrats in Charlotte deserve the president they nominate. They are union members with no self-respect, African Americans who ask nothing for their own people, “anti-war” folks who oppose only Republican wars – and the fat cats who profit from it all. “Romney has no room to criticize Obama because Obama is now the war monger in chief, with the body count to prove it.”

Obama Has Been Speechless on Minimum Wage

 
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
The Democrats cannot even articulate the most basic bread-and-butter issues, like raising the minimum wage. That’s because their standard bearer “has not said anything meaningful about the minimum wage since he was campaigning for president in 2008.” Raising the wage floor is hugely popular, a good issue to run on – but not pleasing to the rich, and therefore a no-no for Obama.

Two-Thirds of Planet Backs Iran Against “West”

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
The Nonaligned Movement, comprising two-thirds of the world’s nations, voted unanimously in support of Iran‘s nuclear power rights. “They rejected the dictates of Washington and London and Paris, endorsing the fundamental principle that Iran has the same sovereign rights as any other nation.” It is the U.S. and Europe that are out of synch with the world.

 

Low-Intensity Warfare In Africa: The US “Policy Wonks” Behind Covert Warfare & Humanitarian Fascism, Part 1 of 2

by Keith Harmon Snow
From the 1980s to today, an elite group of Western intelligence operatives have backed low-intensity guerrilla warfare in certain African ‘hotspots’. Mass atrocities in the Great Lakes and Sudan can be linked to Roger Winter, a pivotal U.S. operative whose ‘team’ was recently applauded for birthing the world’s newest nation, South Sudan. Behind the fairytale we find a long trail of blood and skeletons from Uganda to Sudan, Rwanda and Congo.

Why I Won’t Vote (1956)

 by W.E.B. Dubois
On October 20, 1956, W. E. B. Du Bois delivered this eloquent indictment of US politics and why he won’t vote in the upcoming Presidential election. Du Bois condemns both Democrats and Republicans for their indifferent positions on the influence of corporate wealth, racial inequality, arms proliferation and unaffordable health care. The article appeared in The Nation.

Black Secularists and The Church

 
by Benjamin Woods
African American mythology tells us that the Black Freedom Movement was born in the church. That’s because “the Black church has had better propagandists than Black freethinkers.” But freethinkers also populate the liberation pantheon, while the church has sometimes proven an obstacle to the Movement.

If The Shoe Fits…

 
by Raymond Nat Turner
“In our marching shoes, yes, we can
Discover trails less traveled
Connecting us with sage spirits
Sampling James Brown with John
Brown”

012

 
Blow the Whistle on Stop-and-Frisk
The police racial profiling practice known as stop-and-frisk is “wrong, it is immoral, it is racist and unconstitutional” said social activist Dr. Cornel West, announcing a “Blow the Whistle on Stop-and-Frisk” campaign starting September 13. “This struggle is going to intensify. We want to connect it to the military industrial complex,” the Wall Street complex, the prison industrial complex, and “we want to connect it to this election, where you see the farce between one oligarchic part and another.”
Noche Diaz, an activist facing multiple trials for confronting stop-and-frisk, asked “By is that I have to look at 15 year-olds in the playgrounds of the Bronx, who tell me that if you’re not a white person in this world, you don’t matter?”
Push for $10 Minimum Wage
Democrats are “dialing for the same dollars” as Republicans, seeking corporate campaign contributions and “rejecting Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy,” said social activist Ralph Nader. “Polls show over 70 percent of the American people consistently want a minimum wage kept up with inflation.” Adjusted for inflation, the 1968 minimum wage would now be $10.35, rather than the current $7.25. The United States, said Nader, has “the lowest minimum wage in the western world.”
Black Is Back Coalition Examines Electoral Strategies
“We want to take this conversation beyond an examination of Obama, to an examination of the electoral process, itself,” said Ayesha Fleary, at the recent conference of the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations, in Newark, New Jersey.
“Let us use the electoral process as one form of struggle,” said Coalition chairman Omali Yeshitela. “Our future depends on our willingness to build a real capacity to utilize every form of struggle in the quest for liberation.”
Black people were ill-served by the “misleadership class” that arose after the collapse of the Sixties mass movements, said Glen Ford. “The same class of Black opportunists who has risen to local power through the Blackening of America’s cities, presided over the demographic reversal of fortunes, later on,” with the mounting loss of Black urban majorities.
“Corporate American and the banks have a death grip on Harlem, that will produce an even greater forced migration out of Harlem,” said Nellie Bailey, of the Harlem Tenants Council.
U.S. rulers have placed Black and brown “neocolonialists” in positions of nominal power “to make it appear that people are making progress,” said Charles Barron, the Brooklyn city councilman. What’s needed are “African-conscious, radical, revolutionary people” elected to city councils, nationwide.
“Do we want to participate” in elections “just to raise issues…or to actually get people elected?” asked Larry Hamm, leader of the Newark-based People’s Organization for Progress. “We’ve got to be able to come up with candidates, and when we put people in office, we’ve got to keep them accountable.”