Rastafari Speaks

Rationalizing Idiocy: Attacking Iran For All the Right Reasons?

By Ron Jacobs
January 30, 2012 - dissidentvoice.org

Unlike a couple of years ago, when the consensus was split, there recently seems to be a growing consensus among pundits and certain politicians that Washington will be launching a military attack on Iran. While pundits do not have the power to make war, politicians in Congress certainly do. Furthermore, pundits convinced that this is an advisable route will do their best to bend the ears of those politicians so that there wishes can be filled, especially if those pundits are representing interests that believe they would benefit from such an attack.

Why now? Part of the reason is because the majority of US troops are out of Iraq, thereby leaving a minimal number of American soldiers available for Iranian retaliation. A related reason could be the loss of prestige to Washington with the withdrawal of those troops. It’s not like Washington won its war in Iraq; it’s more like it was a stalemate with Tehran still holding on to a couple key cards. Israel, with an element of its ruling elites always ready to attack any perceived enemy, is of course a constant element in the drive to destroy Iran, as are the ruling families of certain Arab Gulf states that compete with Tehran in the oil market. Iran’s alleged support for various resistance movements in the Middle East and Asia provides Israel with but one more reason to call for war, especially since those resistance movements are primarily opposed to Israel’s expansionist anti-Palestinian policies.

Black America Still Paralyzed, Powerless, Irrelevant

Black America Still Paralyzed, Powerless, Irrelevant: Year 4 of the Obama Era

By Bruce A. Dixon
January 20, 2012 - blackagendareport.com

Three years ago this week, more than 2 million souls, at least half of them African American, converged upon the nation's capital. They came, in what my colleague Glen Ford called the Great Black Hajj of 2009, to witness and celebrate the swearing in of the nation's first African American president. They wept and danced and sang and prophesied. They marveled at how far they had come. It was, their leaders assured them, the beginning of a new day.

Three years later, it's clear that this is indeed a new day, a new era. But for most of black America, it's not the one they hoped for. Nobody expected urban poverty would begin to vanish overnight, or that millions of acres of lost black farmland would be restored. But promises were made, and expectations were justifiably high, not because Barack Obama had promised to investigate Wall Street, prosecute banksters, or stop the imperial wars and illegal foreclosures, but because humans do have the right to expect justice at home and peace abroad, whether their leaders deliver these things or not.

Hell No, We Won�t Go To War Against Africa!

By Mark P. Fancher
January 11, 2012 - blackagendareport.com

“AFRICOM was integrally involved in the imperialist take-over of Libya, and now U.S. troops are trudging through Uganda.”

In 2005, U.S. Army brass panicked after reviewing the results of a specially commissioned study that showed a 41 percent drop in recruitment of people of African descent over a five year period. “It’s alarming,” said a general in charge of Army recruitment. He went on to attribute the de facto boycott to the war in Iraq and the views of teachers, preachers, coaches and other “influencers” in the black community who were urging young people not to sign on to what was ultimately acknowledged by many to be a pointless, senseless invasion and occupation of a sovereign country.

At the time, Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel was quoted as saying: “I have not found a black person in support of this war in my district.” Little wonder. Parents and grandparents still had painful memories of veterans of the U.S. debacle in Vietnam who returned broken physically, mentally and spiritually. The war-resisting spirit of these elders was revived by the then most recent imperialist escapade, and they made clear to their children and grandchildren that they had better “just say ‘no’” to military recruiters when they came calling.

Political Prisoners: Lessons for Occupationists and Us All

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR editor and columnist Jared Ball
December 15, 2011
blackagendareport.com

“We need to encourage a renewed focus on the politically incarcerated because we are likely to see those ranks increase.”

After this week's rally for Mumia Abu-Jamal in Philadelphia, at which much of the focus was his being removed from death row, at least one thing has again been made clear; going forward all movement building must deeply involve the plight of political prisoners. This point was made several ways by several different speakers, including Cornel West who described the more than 30 years of this particular fight, and Desmond Tutu who cautioned that the move of Mumia from death row was cool but not a real victory – and who better than a veteran of the freedom struggle in Azania to tell us about incomplete “victories.” And there was the tireless Ramona Africa who echoed Tutu’s sentiments by acknowledging that not being in solitary confinement was itself no guarantee of safety, and how Mumia’s enemies considered this move a close second to actual execution since he would now be in general population with “his own kind” and likely, hopefully, to be killed by one of them. So what was a rally and tribute to Mumia was also a lesson to be learned about the kinds of struggle required, a lesson we all can use at this time of outspoken frustration with the current world.

Propagandized America

By Margaret Kimberley
November 29, 2011 - blackagendareport.com

“So-called prestigious publications will print the most outrageous information without attribution, investigation or proof of very serious charges.”

When Americans think of propagandized people they think of the now defunct Soviet Union or Nazi Germany or perhaps a banana republic dictatorship of the sort supported by their government. Very few of them would think of themselves as being under the sway of a government and corporations who work hand in glove to tell outright falsehoods or hide important information that is inconvenient for them.

America�s New African Empire

By Paul Craig Roberts
October 21, 2011 - counterpunch.org

Now that the CIA’s proxy army has murdered Gadhafi, what next for Libya?

If Washington’s plans succeed, Libya will become another American puppet state. Most of the cities, towns, and infrastructure have been destroyed by air strikes by the air forces of the US and Washington’s NATO puppets. US and European firms will now get juicy contracts, financed by US taxpayers, to rebuild Libya. The new real estate will be carefully allocated to lubricate a new ruling class picked by Washington. This will put Libya firmly under Washington’s thumb.

With Libya conquered, AFRICOM will start on the other African countries where China has energy and mineral investments. Obama has already sent US troops to Central Africa under the guise of defeating the Lord’s Resistance Army, a small insurgency against the ruling dictator-for-life. The Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, welcomed the prospect of yet another war by declaring that sending US troops into Central Africa “furthers US national security interests and foreign policy.” Republican Senator James Inhofe added a gallon of moral verbiage about saving “Ugandan children,” a concern the senator did not have for Libya’s children or Palestine’s, Iraq’s, Afghanistan’s and Pakistan’s.

High Court Allows Mumia to Breathe, But He is Still Condemned to Social Death

By Glen Ford
October 16, 2011 - blackagendareport.com

“The ruling allows the Philadelphia district attorney to once again seek the death penalty in a new sentencing hearing.”

The United States Supreme Court has ruled that the death penalty imposed on Mumia Abu Jamal, the world’s most famous political prisoner, is unconstitutional because the sentencing jury was not allowed to consider evidence that supported a sentence of life in prison. But the ruling allows the Philadelphia district attorney, Seth Williams, a Black man who has based his career on executing Mumia, to once again seek the death penalty in a new sentencing hearing. If Williams does not seek, or fails to get, a another death penalty, Mumia Abu Jamal will automatically be sentenced to life with no possibility of parole in the 1981 death of a Philadelphia police officer.

Obama Humiliates the Black Caucus � and They Pretend Not to Notice

By BAR executive editor Glen Ford
October 03, 2011 - blackagendareport.com

“Obama has very publicly commanded them to shut up and perform what he believes is their only legitimate function: to get him re-elected.”

This magazine spent much of the 2008 presidential campaign warning that reflexive, unquestioning, uncomplaining support for Barack Obama would render African Americans politically irrelevant for the next four years. “About 90 percent of Black America has allied itself with a candidate that never promised them a damn thing,” we wrote, back on April Fools Day, 2008. One year before, in Selma, Alabama, Obama had first deployed his pseudo-Baptist preacher delivery to announce that Blacks had already come “90 percent of the way” towards equality, strongly inferring that his election would take us the other ten percent of the way, while simultaneously sending “a signal to whites that the days of Black racial agitation were nearly over.”

US Ambassador Echoes Cecil Rhodes

By Stephen Gowans
September 24, 2011 - http://gowans.wordpress.com

When in 1916 Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin expounded what historian V.G. Kiernan would later call virtually the only serious theory of imperialism, despite its shortcomings (1), Lenin cited Cecil Rhodes as among the “leading British bourgeois politicians (who) fully appreciated the connection between what might be called the purely economic and the political-social roots of modern imperialism.” (2)

Rhodes, founder of the diamond company De Beers and of the eponymous Rhodesia, had made the following remarks, which Lenin quoted at length in his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Libya: Imperialism and the Left

By Stephen Gowans
August 28, 2011 - gowans.wordpress.com

While the class character of regimes under siege by Western powers is often explored in analyses of imperialist interventions and is frequently invoked to justify them, it neither explains why capitalist imperialist powers intervene nor stands as a justification for their actions.

The relevant consideration in explaining why interventions occur is not the political orientation of the government under siege, nor its relations with its citizens, but whether it accommodates the profit-making interests of the dominant class in the intervening countries. Does it welcome foreign investment, allow repatriation of profits, demand little in the way of corporate income tax, open its markets, and offer abundant supplies of cheap labor and raw materials? Or does it impose high tariffs on imports, subsidize domestic production, operate state-owned enterprises (displacing opportunities for foreign-private-owned ones), force investors to take on local partners, and insist that workers be protected from desperation wages and intolerable working conditions?