Rastafari Speaks

U.S. Uses International Finance System to Strangle Venezuelan Economy

How the U.S. Is Strangling Haiti as It Attempts Regime Change in Venezuela

By Eric Draitser
January 30, 2019 - counterpunch.org

The US-sponsored coup in Venezuela, still ongoing as I write, is the latest chapter in the long and bloody history of US imperialism in Latin America. This basic fact, understood by most across the left of the political spectrum – including even the chattering liberal class which acknowledges this truth only with the passage of time and never in the moment – must undergird any analysis of the situation in Venezuela today. That is to say, the country is being targeted by the Yanqui Empire.

This point is, or at least should be, indisputable irrespective of one’s opinions of Venezuelan President Maduro, the Socialist Party (PSUV), or the progress of the Bolivarian Revolution. Imperialism, and its neocolonial manifestation in the 21st Century, is there to pick clean the bones of the Bolivarian dream and return Venezuela to the role of subservient asset, an oil-soaked proxy state ruled by a right-wing satrap eager to please the colonial lords of capital.

Martial Law By Other Means: Corporate Strangulation of Dissent

By Glen Ford, BAR executive editor
August 09, 2018 - blackagendareport.com

The ‘hate speech’ trick, in practice, rewards Black people’s occupiers and abusers (the police) and renders voices of protest illegitimate and mute.”

The people that rule the United States are in the third year of a frenzy to blame Russia and its “trolls,” “dupes,” and witting or unwitting “colluders” – including a sitting president – for racial conflicts, eroding respect for public institutions and a general social breakdown in the nation. “We are at war!” they scream, incessantly, and in a thousand well-placed voices. The relentless barrage of war-talk crowds out all other subjects in the corporate media -- the Omnipresent Voice of Oligarchy -- including the actual warswaged all across the globe by the U.S. and its shrinking gaggle of allies.

By now, 65 percent of Americans -- if asked -- tell pollsters they think Russia “interfered” in the 2016 elections. According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released late last month, 41 percent believe that whatever the Russians did had some effect on the election, and 30 percent think Hillary Clinton would be president if the Russians had not interfered.

The British Royal Wedding, Feelgoodism and the Colonial Jumbie

By Tyehimba Salandy
May 20, 2018

Ten years ago, British ‘royalty’, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla visited the Caribbean and locals prostrated before them. Local leaders made arrangements for them to play the Steelpan and the sacred Rastafarian Nyabinghi drums. Leslie from Africaspeaks.com wrote an insightful article titled Royal Visit Highlights Lingering Colonialism that brought attention to the dynamics of colonialism in this visit. This article is as relevant today as it was ten years ago when it was written, given the celebratory eruptions at the wedding of British monarch Prince Harry and his bride Meghan Markle. Yet the region is poorer today for elevating fake royalty to dizzying heights of reverence while neglecting the royalty inherent in resistant Caribbean voices who have worked hard at improving Caribbean societies.

While many people gush at royalty and the “power of love”, for people of the Caribbean and wider global south, who are still faced with the structures of British coloniality imbedded deeply in our society and the world we live in, it is an opportunity to reflect on these issues.

Zimbabwe Open for Business, Code for International Finance Capitalism

By Netfa Freeman
March 15, 2018 - blackagendareport.com

“Zimbabwe’s new president offered an open invitation to international capital investment and latecomers for Zimbabwe’s trek down the neoliberal development road.”

Over the last four months, peddling the mantra “Zimbabwe is open for business,” the country’s new president in cahoots with the Western press has been whitewashing a military coup into a popular, peaceful revolution that brought from exile a benevolent leader and placed him in power on an interim basis until elections. Omitted from the portrayal of the March 11, 2018 op-ed, “We Are Bringing About the New Zimbabwe ,” published in the New York Times and by-lined to Zimbabwe’s sitting president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, are all the maneuvers selling out the country’s political independence. Given reports of what happened to some of ZANU-PF’s G40 faction, including the killing of a bodyguard, and jailing with allegations of torture from November 14, 2017, until at least Robert Mugabe resigned as president a week later, the accounts in Mnangagwa’s op-ed are a pretty audacious rewriting of history.

Shadow Armies: The Unseen, But Real US War In Africa

By Ramzy Baroud
January 12, 2018

There is a real – but largely concealed – war which is taking place throughout the African continent. It involves the United States, an invigorated Russia and a rising China. The outcome of the war is likely to define the future of the continent and its global outlook.

It is easy to pin the blame on US President Donald Trump, his erratic agenda and impulsive statements. But the truth is, the current US military expansion in Africa is just another step in the wrong direction. It is part of a strategy that had been implemented a decade ago, during the administration of President George W. Bush, and actively pursued by President Barack Obama.

In 2007, under the pretext of the ‘war on terror’, the US consolidated its various military operations in Africa to establish the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM). With a starting budget of half a billion dollars, AFRICOM was supposedly launched to engage with African countries in terms of diplomacy and aid. But, over the course of the last 10 years, AFRICOM has been transformed into a central command for military incursions and interventions.

Clearing the Smoke and Mirrors Around Zimbabwe

By Netfa Freeman
November 29, 2017 - blackagendareport.com

“The West, led by Britain and the U.S., have been engaged in a regime policy against the Southern African nation for the last 18 years.”

Reasons for examining what is happening in Zimbabwe are many but few to none can be found in accounts by major news media or from liberal progressive pundits. Such accounts are busy reinforcing the over simplified and misinforming narrative that forcing out former 93 year-old president Robert Mugabe marks the end of 37 years of brutal dictatorship that has driven the country into economic disaster.

The over simplified version being fed to the general public is that everything kicked off after Mugabe fired a disagreeable vice-President. Zimbabwe is to be seen as just another African country with a long reigning dictator who presides over the repression and impoverishment of his own people who really are unable to govern themselves without the aid of the benevolent West.

What is Behind the Military Coup in Zimbabwe?

By Gregory Elich
November 21, 2017 - gregoryelich.org

Long-roiling factional conflict within Zimbabwe’s ruling ZANU-PF political party exploded last week in a military coup that quickly seized control of the government and state media. The coup was led by Commander of Zimbabwe Defense Forces Constantino Chiwenga, who is closely aligned with former vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa.

Emboldened by President Robert Mugabe’s declining mental sharpness and physical health in recent years, Mnangagwa actively maneuvered to ensure that he would succeed the president. Mnangagwa served as one of Zimbabwe’s two vice presidents. From that position, he and his supporters, known as Team Lacoste, became embroiled in a bitter struggle with younger party members who coalesced around Secretary of Women’s Affairs Grace Mugabe, wife of the president, and whose group was known as Generation 40, or G40.

Why marijuana became illegal

By Noel Kalicharan
April 22, 2017

The "war on marijuana" has been waged for close to one hundred years, cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, made criminals out of millions of otherwise law-abiding persons, denied life-saving medicine to millions more, without making the smallest dent in its availability.

Three men orchestrated the war: William Randolph Hearst (newspaper magnate), Andrew Mellon (former Treasury Secretary and one of America’s wealthiest bankers and industrialists) and Harry Anslinger (appointed by his uncle-in-law Mellon to be the first Commissioner of the Treasury Department’s newly reorganized Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, forerunner to the Drug Enforcement Agency). Throw in the DuPont Chemical Company, whose main financier was Mellon Bank, and you have the prime players.