This week in Black Agenda Report

“Operation Afro-Dilution”: Michigan’s Plan to Flood Detroit with Upscale Immigrants

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

 It is the general consensus among white people that Detroit’s problem is, too many Blacks. Michigan’s governor has a solution: flood the city with upscale green card holders. “An infusion of global migrants would enable Detroit’s corporate masters to market the metropolis as a ‘cosmopolitan’ urban cocktail, as opposed to the nation’s largest ‘Chocolate City.’”

Whoever suggests the Snowden revelations mean nothing to the lives of ordinary black people either isn’t paying close attention, or is working for the police and prison state. The federal DEA, the Justice Department’s federal drug police, have passed tons illegal NSA spying data to local police agencies and cynically coached them to lie about the sources of their evidence. It’s not exaggeration or hype. You can view the manuals online for yourself.

It often seems that the American national pastime is murderous assault on Black people. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement’s tally of one racist homicide every 28 hours is surely understated. The more Blacks die, the harder some whites push for broader latitude to kill them. There is no reciprocity in Stand Your Ground. “Self-defense means nothing when a black person asserts that right.”

A deep social crisis is upon us, and the rulers know it – their system created it. “Obama’s feel good rhetoric and his Administration’s minimalist program of ‘promise zones,’ corporate funded jobs programs that don’t actually employ anyone and rhetorical concern for income inequality, are preemptive moves geared to mitigate any demands that might emerge for fundamental reforms or radical change.”

If Fox News is the Republican ministry of TV propaganda, MSNBC is the mouthpiece of the White House and corporate Democrats. The last real journalist in an MSNBC host spot was Phil Donahue, fired for letting antiwar lefties on the air once in a while. MSNBC must have a lot of confidence that their new host Joy Ann Reid will carry their water, and leverage her black face to carry their message to us, instead of the other way around.

Come to an evening of music, song and sharing love for recently released People’s Lawyer Lynne Stewart.  Because of a determined people’s movement, Lynne is finally home with her family. But she has urgent medical needs and costs. Lynne’s Stage 4 breast cancer spread a year ago to both lungs, back, bones, and lymph nodes. Now 74, she has lost weight and has trouble breathing; doctors estimate her lifespan at 12 months. Lynne will soon begin treatment requiring her to pay deductibles and co-­payments. To boost the odds, she’ll use a special diet, ­vitamins, and other healing methods – some costly and none covered by insurance.

As the Smarter Sentencing Act moves through Congress, President Obama masquerades as a prison reformer. In reality, the administration “has placed legal roadblocks in the way of release for thousands” and “has no intention of limiting the scope and powers of the Incarceration State.”

Under dictator Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s military is highly paid for peacekeeping duties in Darfur, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Haiti – despite its role in the death of millions in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The West depends on Kagame as its man in Africa, and in return gives impunity to his criminal network. 

The judge in Detroit’s disastrous bankruptcy process has, at least temporarily, blocked the wholesale transfer of much of the city’s assets to predatory bankers. But public dialogue must be made to focus on “cancellation of the debt allegedly ‘owed’ to the banks by Detroit,” so that the people can seize “new opportunities to build a new city.”

Washington’s selective memory of Cuba’s role in the world – and America’s own sordid past and present – prevents its leaders from seeing reality clearly. But President Obama witnessed first hand that Africa remembers who its friends are. “While the Cubans were fighting for the liberation of the people of South Africa, successive American governments did everything they could to stop them.”

What about the lost fear of being in prison?
Is “thug life” a given to create art?
What is “keepin’ it real?”
Real is when whitey makes the deal

Livin’ on nothin’, while hunger works full time

No wonder, some brothers stumble into crime.

President Obama’s “most unmemorable” State of the Union address shows “he represents corporate America and empire,” said Kevin Alexander Gray, the Columbia, South Carolina Black activist and author of Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics. “We’ve got to challenge those folks who are operating for the interests of the corporations and not in the interests of the people, folks like [New Jersey Senator] Cory Booker, like [Atlanta Mayor] Kasim Reed – and like Barack Obama.”

“If you look at Obama’s speech, he is still stuck in a neoliberal economic paradigm that has been quite destructive for ordinary Americans,” said Lynn Parramore, a senior editor at Alternet and author of the article, “State of the Union: Obama’s Underwhelming Plan to Tackle Inequality.” Denizens of Wall Street are treated as “too big to jail,” said Parramore. “Seeing bankers walk off Scot-free when they’ve done things a thousand times worse than what most people sitting in America’s prisons have done, is damaging to the spirit of the country.”

“Democrats only take up the cause of the minimum wage when Republicans are in office, to reinforce their fake ‘brand’ as champions of the oppressed,” said Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce Dixon. “When Democratic are in power, their attention drifts elsewhere,” said Dixon, noting that Obama did next to nothing to boost the minimum wage or pass union-favored “card check” legislation when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, during his first two years in office.

The nation’s best-known political prisoner seemed aghast at news that 85 people possess wealth equal to the assets of 3.5 billion people – half the world’s population. “Rome, infamous for its rich and corrupt senate, never saw such inequality as this,” said Mumia Abu Jamal, in a recent Prison Radio commentary. “Marx, for all of his acumen, never saw that coming.”

West Virginia officials claim it’s now safe for the Charleston area’s 300,000 people to drink the local water, following a huge chemical spill early last month. But Russell Mokhiber, editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter, said only folks with no other options are drinking the water. “The people in the know, the legislators, the lawyers, the doctors in Charleston, when you press them: Are you drinking the water, are you letting your family drink the water? – they say no.”

Robert Greenfield IV, a Black Student Union leader at the University of Michigan, said the administration is deliberately marginalizing students of color. Diversity is “something that doesn’t naturally occur in the United States,” said Greenfield. “Unfortunately, you do have to have an artificial hand to make sure that people from the marginalized societies have an equal opportunity with their white counterparts.”

Students of history should check out the new documentary Anita, the story of Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas at the 1991 Senate hearings on his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, said Dr. Donald Smith, professor emeritus of education at New York City’s Baruch College. “Unfortunately, many people did not support Anita Hill,” said Dr. Smith. “It’s still difficult to understand, to this day, why Clarence Thomas would have been supported by so many Black people, including Maya Angelou. A lot of Black people gave him a pass.”

Simple justice demands that Clarence Moses El, who has spent the last 27 years in a Colorado prison on a rape and assault conviction, deserves a new trial, said Larry Hale, of the People’s Power Assemblies. Denver police “lost” DNA evidence that might have acquitted Moses El, but a U.S. Supreme Court precedent holds that “destruction of evidence, in and of itself, does not constitute bad faith” on the part of law enforcement, said Hale. The only witness against Moses El, the victim, said she identified him after a vision in a dream, and another inmate has confessed to the crime. The People’s Power Assemblies are circulating a petition on Moses El’s behalf.

“In the last four years we’ve had four Black bodies come floating up in Lake Michigan, and every time it ends up with” officials finding no evidence of “foul play,” said community activist Rev. Edward Pinkney, of mostly Black Benton Harbor, Michigan. Rev. Pinkney strongly suspects police involvement in the killings, and has called for mass demonstrations on March 1.