Category Archives: american history

Marimba Ani On Obama: Whose History? Whose Promise?

Posted on by drumsintheglobalvillage

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From The BlackList.

BREAKING THE SILENCE, FULFILLING THE PROMISE

Marimba Ani

Amura Onaa tells us that when our Ancestors were being torn apart from each other, we looked into each other’s eyes and made a solemn promise. We promised to reconnect with each other so that this tearing apart would never happen again. It is the Afrikan belief that we are our Ancestors reborn, and through this spiritual rebirth, we gain eternal life. The promise could only be fulfilled by future generations returning as Afrikans who had made this sacred promise to each other. What our Ancestors suffered over centuries, could only have been survived because they had hope. But what could possibly have given them cause for hope? If they had not survived and bore children who bore children who bore children, we would not be here. It is the Afrikan belief that we choose to be born when we are in the spirit world, and that we make a contract to fulfill a purpose in this life. All of this can only mean that we have chosen to be born Afrikan and that we are the hope of our Ancestors. Our purpose on this earth is to avenge our Ancestors and to achieve the victory: Afrikan sovereignty through a Pan-Afrikan world order based on the principles of MAAT. It is our choice to fulfill The Promise to our Ancestors by achieving the victory denied them.

It is now Tuesday, November 4, 2008. Is this the final act of assimilation, accommodation, and integration? Is this how we are fulfilling our promise to the Ancestors? Has America made restitution for what was done to them, still being done to us? Is the Maafa over or has it merely morphed into another, more insidious form of genocide? Are we now experiencing a life-threatening condition of cultural AIDS in which our immune system has turned on itself? Has the Yurugu virus mutated so that it looks like us? Are we participating in our own self-destruction?

We are witnessing a time of the most blatant acts of genocide such as “Katrina” (Maafa – 2005), in which thousands of our people were slaughtered, left to die, placed in disease-producing holding pens, forcibly relocated, separated from their families and support-systems, and their (our) children “lost”, all this for the purpose of corporate profit and for the illegal misappropriation of land.

In our time, Afrikan mothers are being incarcerated in increasing numbers, so that their presence in the u.s. prison system almost equals that of Afrikan men and fathers, who have, for more than a century, been sacrificed to the prison-industrial complex.

We are living in the time of Blackwater, mercenaries used by government and corporations. We are living in the time of American support of European Hegemony taken to the most extreme levels ever in history. We watch as America’s bank, the so-called “world bank,” sucks the life out of Afrika, Jamaica and other Black nations. We are living in the time of the IMF, the Federal Reserve, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderbergers and more.

The Patriot Act is an updated McCarran Act of 1950. We are living in a time that can be understood as part of “the process of Fascism”. Fascism creates a demon, sells this demonization to the public, then uses it to control (intimidate, detain, torture, kill) anyone who challenges the state’s abuse of human rights. In the l950’s the demons were the “subversives,” and the “communists” ?throughout the “cold war,” in 1968, following the assassination of Dr. King, the demons were those suspected of being “guerrillas”, and by 2001 the term “terrorists” had been accepted as describing the new “demons.” Should we allow the original, the real terrorists to define “terrorism” ?

This brief statement is only meant to point to the reality of the times in which we live, the political legacy that we have inherited as “americans,” and what we need to be aware of at this “historic” moment. In the 1960’s, our people were regarded by the rest of the world as leaders in the struggle for human rights as we fought to expose and confront the genocidal policies perpetrated by the american government towards Afrikan people in the u.s.

We stopped organizing. We stopped confronting “the system.” We became part of “the system.” We sent our sons to fight for u.s. monetary gain. We did not see value in self-determination, self-definition, and self-reliance for our people. Those who were politically conscious read and talked about ancient history. We no longer concerned ourselves with contemporary events, systems, or political realities. Instead of expanding our movement to become a world movement, a truly Pan-Afrikan movement, we were content to become “individuals” in the “greatest” (most materially powerful) country in the world.

So now we are “making history” by being swept up in someone else’s definition of what history is. We are “making history,” by capitulating to integration, accommodation, and assimilation. We have reached the mountain top, for we have been able to vote for a “first to.” The struggle is over. We have won. We can proudly say that one of our people represents the most repressive, destructive, inhumane, anti-Afrikan nation ever to have existed! We are proud to be part of a multinational corporate structure run by sociopathic adolescents who think nothing of stealing from their own people. (Imagine what they will do to us.)

We say that we vote because our Ancestors died to get the vote. Yes, if you decide to vote, that is your “right.” Do not, however, blame it on “the Ancestors.” That’s like saying Black people died to go to school with white people, so I will make sure that my children go to white schools. I have a personal experience of that Movement. Registering to vote in Mississippi was a means of confronting a system of oppression head on. Today we vote to avoid confrontation with a system that is Fascist. In Mississippi, attempting to register, meant putting your life on the line, if you were Black. This effort became part of a strategy to expose the system of oppression that existed in this country, which continues to exist even though we, Black people, can now “vote” (even in Mississippi). No, that is not what our Ancestors died for. They died to fulfill The Promise. And that is the question that we should raise. “What are we doing to fulfill The Promise?”

Is this occasion “historic” because it represents the abandonment of our sacred obligation to the Ancestors? Will we go down in “his” story as having finally capitulated and become satisfied with the evil that is represented in contemporary globalization, privatization and international capitalism? Have we aborted our movement for freedom, liberation and sovereignty? Or have we merely redefined that objective in “american” individualistic, “what’s in it for me” terms? Have we now “won”? Or have we simply taken the easier road, finding it more comfortable to be colonized than to fight for liberation? Are we excited about the possibility of being closer to power than we have ever been beforeS, even though that power rests on the exploitation, even murder, of Afrikans and other non-Europeans throughout the world? Have we even dared to ask ourselves “what kind of person would want to be president of the United States of America?”

What is the significance of this moment, Tuesday, November 4, 2008, in “our” story?

Let us make this a time for reassessment of our lives, each of us. Let us reconnect with each other in ways that will help our people to become self-sustaining. Let us read and study and become aware of what this country stands for in the world. Let us teach and learn about the monetary system.

Organize, Organize, Organize!

Food cooperatives,
Investment groups
Independent Afrikan schools
Alternative sustainable energy
Communal and collective social entities
Susus (saving together)
Vehicles for harnessing and sharing our resources
Ways of educating ourselves for optimal healthy living
Methods for alternative social organization
The study of ways in which our Ancestors organized communities, so that we can get ideas for the future (doing Sankofa)
Black political conventions
An independent Afrikan/Black vehicle for political action and race (Kanda) decision-making
A Back-to-Afrika process.

We must read the following:

Blueprint for Black Power (Amos Wilson) (especially chapter 31)
The Choice (Sam Yette)
There is A River (Vincent Harding)
The condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States of America (Martin Delany)
The Miseducation of the Negro (Carter G. Woodson)
The Destruction of Black Civilization (Chancellor Williams)
Two Thousand Seasons (Ayi Kwei Armah)
Wretched of the Earth (Franz Fanon)

By Europeans:
The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein)

And watch:

Goodbye Uncle Tom
Zeitgeist
Zeitgeist Addendum
End Games
Loose Change
The Corporation
(pass this on and add suggestions)

Go to:
www.libradio.com
www.blackagendareport.com
www.houseofknowledge.com

Let this be a beginning again for us. Let us have the courage of Martin Delany and others, who organized the Black Convention Movement, and sought Afrikan sovereignty in the 1850’s. Let us recapture the spirit of the 60’s, with its “togetherness” of our people, only now with greater clarity about what we want. Let us revive the independent political party movement of the early 70’s (NBIP and CAP), when our people came together in activism in Gary, Indiana and elsewhere. Let us organize with our people, out of love for our people. Let us build a movement without hierarchy among the most economically depressed of our people; a movement that will be responsive to the immediate survival needs of our people, while raising the political consciousness and knowledge-base of us all. Let us study together and build together and fight together and teach each other. Let us build a revolutionary Pan-Afrikanist movement of all of our people, so that we can hold any and all elected officials accountable for their decisions and actions. Let us be in the vanguard of the movement for radical upheaval of the american reality. Let us organize a support system for the Katrina resistors. Let us not forget them. Let us organize sustainable struggle and self-sustaining institutions that can protect our people from the intentional “disasters” of monopoly capitalism, and save them in the natural disasters caused by the greed and selfishness of the rulers.

Let this be the moment in which we step back onto the stage of history, shouting ourstory to the world. “We are not capitulating.” “We are not allowing ourselves to be part of a Fascist nation.” We are not giving up our people, our movement, or our Ancestors for “one america.” Let us be unrelenting in our confrontation with the anti-Afrikan, anti-human mechanisms of oppression.

Never forget that our power is in our connectedness. If they did not succeed in disconnecting us through the middle passage, through enslavement and lynching and incarceration, let them not succeed now through the duplicity of false “democracy.”
Let us not believe the hype. This is not our victory. This “historic occasion” is a victory for america, it is a victory for the status quo, for all of the things that we should be fighting against. Be in Washington DC in January to make demands on the new administration. If you voted for it, make it work for you!

Let us make this a time for real change, a time for fulfilling The Promise. Tugane pamoja tutafune nia yetu. “Let us come together and define our cause.” Let the circle be unbroken.

Marimba Ani
A Race Woman, A Cultural Warrior

The Dilemma

Posted on by drumsintheglobalvillage

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This might be a good prologue to the below.

Barack Obama’s Historic Achievement: It’s An Inspiring Day, But Civil Rights March Must Continue

By Rev. Al Sharpton

Wednesday, November 5th 2008

Barack Obama’s candidacy has changed forever the landscape of America because now all parents, regardless of race, can say to their children that if you work hard and sacrifice, study and help others, you can become President. That is an amazing testament to the transformational character of Obama’s White House run.

And the country as a whole should be proud because Obama’s candidacy was never truly hobbled or engulfed by the issue of race. Instead, the American people adhered to the Rev. Martin Luther King’s standard that a man be judged by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin.

Some will argue that Obama’s candidacy represents the official beginning of a “postracial” era in America, where neither race nor civil rights claims are relevant. Others will claim that Obama now trumps whatever cards I and other civil rights leaders may possess.

Such arguments misread the racial tea leaves swirling through America. The fact remains that, although the nation is willing to make important and laudatory exceptions to the “race rule,” it still exists. African-Americans are not treated equally as a people and must struggle for equality every day. This doesn’t change after Obama’s remarkable run.

Consider that a recent national poll showed that 40% of white people held a negative view of African-Americans as a people. This view will not disappear because of Obama, and should he struggle going forward, those negative views against blacks would rise dramatically.

Further, the issues that stoke the smoldering embers beneath the discussion of race and racism are still with us even while Obama soars. Just last year, hangman nooses dotted the countryside of the very states that Obama campaigned in so effectively. The tragedy of Sean Bell, the innocent man gunned down by police, happened during this election season. The Jena 6 case (in which black teenagers were treated much more harshly than their white counterparts despite causing similar mischief) and the Genarlow Wilson case (in which a teenager got a prison sentence for having oral sex with a fellow teenager) are both signs of an unequal justice system slow to change.

Further, closing the education achievement gap between black and white students, perhaps the civil rights issue of our generation, will not happen solely because a black man is a national leader of unprecedented stature.

Significantly, to expect that a President Obama would be the right person to lead the fight for civil rights in America because he is black is to exacerbate these combustible race problems and widen the chasm between blacks and whites. Why? Because white people would quite fairly resent such a unilateral, herculean effort by a national leader who is also African-American. Justifiably or not, Obama would be viewed by many as self-dealing.

Yet if Obama stays mute on race issues, his exalted public position will do nothing to improve the lives of people of color whose rights are being violated daily. In that instance, leaders like me must keep him accountable, because to allow Obama to ignore the plight of black America would fan the flames of racial injustice.

We should have always understood that whoever our first black President would be, he would be leader of all the people, not just black America. Further, we must recognize that without the appropriate consciousness-raising by civil rights leaders, race issues could either doom such a leader to a failed one-term presidency or doom America to remaining hostage to its inglorious racial past.

Both options are untenable and threaten to divide us further along racial lines.

So, although Obama’s candidacy has fantastically and forever shattered the shackles in the American psyche that a black person can’t make it in America, it says nothing – yet – about what blacks as a people can achieve, particularly when we are viewed skeptically by so many.

And until we have reached that tipping point where race does not negatively affect millions of people of color – as opposed to just one – there is still much more work for me and other civil rights leaders to do.

Sharpton is president of the National Action Network.

A Black-On-Black Love Story

Posted on by drumsintheglobalvillage

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From April Silver.

My Letter to the President Will Have to Wait

by April R. Silver

November 5, 2008

“Let’s just remember and remember and remember black love. There must be something inherently right about that.” – – – “Hot Beverage in Winter” by Ras Baraka featuring Lauryn Hill (Shorty for Mayor CD, 1998)

Early this morning, Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech as President Elect of the United States of America. No one can fully comprehend the depth and scope of this in just the first few hours of this new day. Everything is surreal and I am simultaneously concerned and excited. In all my natural leanings toward wanting to be objective and sober, I could not help but give in to the emotional weight of the moment.

“The day after the revolution is the hardest part of the work.” I heard this first during my student activist days at Howard University. Who will stay to do the work when the euphoria subsides? Will the electorate’s perseverance match our passion? And would an Obama administration do all the things that Obama would lead us to believe it can do? These and other critical questions are crashing around in my head, but I will save my “Dear, Mr. President” letter for another time. Even in these moments after the speech, I am moved by something that is less political…something right beneath the surface of this historic moment: the Michelle and Barack black-on-black love story. I have been checking them out, as a couple, since 2004 and today my delight with Michelle and Barack is unspeakable. In fact, I think their black-on-black love story is as powerful and enduring a message as any ground-breaking political symbol that this election represents.

While high profile marriages often seem manufactured and obligatory (I certainly thought that of John and Cindy, and even Bill and Hilary); I don’t get that from Michelle and Barack. I see a sincere relationship handled with loving affection. Whenever they are together, even in front of thousands of people, don’t you get the feeling that you’re getting a glimpse of some coded language between two lovers on the move? The inter-locked fingers while hand-holding; the tug on the waist just a little below the belt; the knowing stare into each others’ eyes; Michelle’s tendency to lean gently on Barack’s face…eyes closed, savoring; the whispering in each other’s ears; or the now infamous “pound” (known to outsiders as the “fist-bump” or the “terrorist jab”). I guarantee my weight in gold that most women – regardless of race – have noticed these things. And I double guarantee that Black women have talked about these nuances longer than any group.

Like most Black women in my circle – straight and lesbian – I am absolutely giddy that Obama is partnered with a Black woman (of the browner hue, too!). That Michelle epitomizes strength and intelligence is heavenly. I’m sure my mild obsession with this power couple has something to do with my current station as a 40 year old whose love life sounds less like “Yes, we can!” and more like “Oh no he didn’t!” But an appreciation of the whole “Michelle Factor” in this presidential election is probably heralded most by Black women because we know something about the pain that comes from being rejected by Black men. For us, Michelle and her marriage run counter to the notion that it is okay for Black men (or anyone) to disregard, betray, con, or abuse us (or any woman, for that matter). On the contrary, their marriage shows us one more Black woman who is loved, respected, adored, and affirmed as a partner. That opportunity does not come often enough. So we are happy for Michelle, living vicariously through her, hoping to duplicate our own version of her good fortune. We know that there is something inherently right about Black love. With Michelle helping to bring that to the White House, backed with a Stevie Wonder soundtrack, well Good God! It’s barely believable. Dare we conjure up what that could mean for the relationships in our homes, in our communities?

I have no illusions that the Obamas’ union is perfect, but I know a love balance when I see one. The Obamas may not intend for their partnership to have a positive affect on Black families, but we know that it will. In all their requirements to be general and all-inclusive as they transform into the President and First Lady of the United States of America, they can’t hide their own happy love affair…and that’s a good thing! If this black-on-black love affair with Michelle is the only signal that comes from Barack that let’s African Americans know that he “sees” us, then I’ll take it! His choice of Michelle as his wife and his affection towards her seems to suggest a great deal about him, who he can relate to, and in whose arms he feels safe. That is more powerful than any words he can say.

"American Junkies" by Amiri Baraka

Posted on by drumsintheglobalvillage

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I’m stealing this article from April Silver’s Akila Worksongs. As many of you know, Baraka’s been clear on this election.

From Amiri Baraka, October 27, 2008

American Junkies

What should be understood in the current presidential campaign is that there are millions of junkies in this country. Addicted to White Supremacy. It is an addiction much stronger and much harder to kick than Heroin, also known as “Horse” or “Scag” or to the real down street people, “Boy” (So we can see that male chauvinism must be one of its components). What is also amusing, to a point, is that another addictive substance, Cocaine is called “Girl”. Americans hooked on Boy since the slave trade. Girl is more recent but they are old time junkies.

The scariness of these addictions can be realized by anyone following the campaign for president with any amount of objectivity. For instance, no matter that it should be clearly understood that McCain (say what?) has been little more than a very mild underarm deodorant for the Republicans. Having voted with Bush 90% of the time. And to his crack to Obama that he wasn’t W., that’s not a very good excuse. Most people would admit that, except when checking his voting record.

And let’s face it the Republicans, with their “Southern (white racist) Strategy” have acted like a thing with no legs in the years since Reagan. The Willie Horton race baiting stunt in the Dukakis’ election or the “SwiftBoat” character assassination has been typical. Not unlike McCain’s use of the William Ayers terrorist association gimmick or the why- we- must-find-a-cure-for-melanoma-by-election-time cheer leader Sarah Palin.

Palin herself seems, despite the typical thoughtlessness of McCain’s choice, part of my logical analogy of Boy & Girl drugs for Americans, though perhaps inaccurately named, if McCain is Scag, “Boy”, a downer, Palin is “Girl” some head rattling “Blow” for Americans the GOP thinks are “that dumb”. One hopes that there are an overwhelming number of women who will be deeply insulted by McCain’s attempt to use Palin as the “beard” to masquerade the dead-end dullness of his campaign.

But if we can make light of McCain’s shallowness and often desperate and dangerous stumbling, we should also be aware that we are surrounded by millions of white supremacy junkies, who no matter the obvious disparities between the candidates, are ready to “shoot up” another time with whiteness and get that pathological “high”. The theme of the McCain campaign is yet another indication of who McCain & Palin are, “Country First” is nothing but “Deutschland Uber Alles” (Hitler’s theme song) in redneck. McCain knows and his handlers know even more clearly that they are playing the race card, as the Republican Party has known it has been playing the race card, since Kennedy’s murder. There’s some evidence that the crew in the white house as we speak have been put there by his murderers. McCain has been dealing in redneck racist code throughout the campaign. His referring to Obama as “that one” has been cited by many as muffled n- word calling. But it has been the total contexting of Obama as “other”, “not one of us”, “un-American”,”unpatriotic”, even by some fools earlier, as “not black enough”.

Obama, on the other hand, has been usually quite skilled at deflating, disarming and redirecting most of McCain’s most brazen attempts to not so subtlely character assassinate or brand him. McCain’s relentless use of lies and half truths, teeth set hatching a frozen fake smile trying to appear magnanimous (as in the last debate) while his eyes spin around like pinned down billiard balls imagining a retort better than he will come up with.

What is frankly scary is that, for instance, after the last debate where Obama stated and restated defense, healthcare, economic choices to McCain’s continuously over generalized calls for “working together” in the most false sounding altruistic television host tone, sounding more desperate than convincing, when you heard the comments of some of the commentators after the debate you wondered were you watching the same program. The debate was so one-sided that even discounting different reactions by people holding different ideologies and philosophical and political expectation, you got the feeling that you were watching some junkies who’d just “shot up” analogy between the how the failure and fall of Germany’s Weimar Republic, the last democratic republic prior to Nazi Germany’ occurred in a time much like our own. In that Germany the chaos and confusion and economic weakness and social debilitation caused first the World War 1 led to the creation of the German Socialist Workers Party, led to the rise of Hitler and the destruction of that democracy by a Fascism that engulfed the world in World War 2.

The moral and political poison of the Iraq war has hollowed this nation out on the inside and made it seem like Count Dracula to the rest of the world, even to the other imperialist Draculas. Economically, at 12 billion dollars a month it has even cost this nation its titular distinction as “Head Dracula”. These wars, which at base are supposedly aimed at destroying Osama bin Laden, Qaeda, and Terrorism worldwide , since 911 has been focused on an “Axis of Evil” (Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, North Korea, China) which are all colored people. Just as the majority of the people in the world are colored.

But the Bush years, actually going back to Reagan’s toppling of what was left of the legacy of the “New Deal”, the would be benevolent monopoly capitalism of the “welfare state” and the beginning of the “supply side” sharper “trickle down” philosophy and policies of the glutton hyper imperialist state, marked by relentless deregulation in order that Dracula might feed without limitations and all the internal draculas within it, its corporate parasites might also feed without limitation without regulation has suddenly crashed, just as Hoover’s blood filled monstrosity fell in 1929 . Just as the present unregulated monstrosity of overeating and defecating on everything throughout the world has been stunned by its own madness and crashed. It is not an “economic crisis” it is a crash!

This is the other aspect of national American addiction , and the creation of a population loaded with junkies, an addiction to monopoly capitalism, imperialism, as its world face. American imperialism has now not only reached the limits of its bloated terror on the world (and it is significant that now one of the most ubiquitous health problems in the country is obesity. As if nature itself were screaming, Oh Beast! Stop yrself! But in the frenzy of deregulation in all directions topped by the maniacal Bush-Cheney unilateral monstrosity, defaulting on treaties from global warming, anti missile, nuclear, world court, geneva convention, eating up, blowing up, murdering, marauding around the globe just like Bush walks, the strut of an empty fool.

The major problem with the crazed deregulation of Monopoly Capitalism for big capital itself is that in the end it is so insatiable that it will eat itself up. The willful permissiveness of the Bush regime allowed the corporations to run wild in its search for profit at any cost. One aspect of this bloated feeding is it allowed many of the financial institutions to turn themselves into little more than snake oil salesmen, con artists, until they started conning each other, not just the 6000 homeowners that are being foreclosed each day.

Yet when the markets crashed after all the bullshit about “Free Enterprise” and the “Market System” which is all they mean by “Freedom” and “Liberty” when they lose their shirts gaming us and each other, they are allowed to come crawling back to us for our money, for our tax money. Remember when they talked about “Government Bailout” they are talking about political and financial criminals saving their grand life styles with our money. Not a dime to bail out the foreclosed homeowners, but more of our money to bail out the criminals, so they can go on being criminals. It is not a bailout, it is a crime. Million and Billionaires using working people’s money so they can stay rich.

So they can live in their nice, clean, quiet, well policed, well employed, educationally secure, culturally nourished communities while you live in neighborhoods where to go to the store is a risk. “Bailout”? I know if I spend 800 Billion dollars I don’t want “oversight, I want to own it!” But that’s socialism they scream, well if they don’t like it, if monopoly capitalism and the free market are so superior why do they run to public funds to save themselves? We don’t need a bailout to restore monopoly capitalism’s gangster institutions control of our lives. We need to buy those institutions and turn them into publicly owned institutions.

Those foreclosed homeowners should be paying their restored mortgages at lower rationalized rates with no hidden trick increases to public institutions and those resources returned equitably to the community rather than bloating already obese fat cats and their legal criminal enterprises.

Notice, also, how now McCain (is he related to the biblical Cain who slew the Able) they are accusing Obama of socialism. I wish some of these pseudo and infantile leftists would understand that if Obama is talking about universal healthcare as opposed to McCain giving everyone $5000 bucks to give to one of the criminal health care providers which would be taxed, that he is playing the “market” game in the end, i.e. merely giving your money back to the culprits of this financial crash. And leaving most of us without health care. Why? Because as long as the ruling class corporations are making your money its “free enterprise” but to put such things as health care and housing under democratic public control is “bad” because its “socialism”. Not quite. But it is a step toward what would be State Capitalism, which would be infinitely superior to Big Dog eat Little Person system that exists under monopoly capitalism. This should be easier to see now. One reason it is not is because the media is owned by the same corporate criminals.

That’s another reason why the media are the most racist of racist influences in the campaign and why they muffle the real meaning of the fall of almighty capital. In Europe where I’m heading now to work reading poetry, the dollar, once like mighty whitey is now worth about 60 cents. Since 911 when sympathy for the US poured in, the political and moral macabre “boss of the world” unilateralism of the Bush-Cheney craziness has turned the US image into a demoniacal laughing stock.

But US citizens must be forced to kick the twin addictions of Monopoly Capitalism and Racism, but we should also understand Male Chauvinism and Homophobia are sustained by monopoly capitalism. In these last two weeks of the campaign we can expect to see incredible examples of these sick and obsessive pathologies. Already there is an ignorant asshole riding through downtown Miami with a t shirt the back of which reads!” Nigger, Please! It’s the White House” or the west coast Republican women who have produced a fake food stamp with Obama’s likeness on it surrounded by, say what? A watermelon, some barbecue ribs, a bucket of fried chicken and some Kool Aid. These dimwitted debutants claim they didn’t think it was racist. But no one thought they could think anything anyway. They’re just addicts, so is my man with the shirt. In a poem of mine I called the white house “the Caucasian Crib” but if some of these dope addicts can kick maybe even go cold turkey maybe we can begin to change that. Not necessarily those I mentioned, but some of the hundreds of thousands with less funky “joneses” than those!

It’s at least obvious to me that if the left is to have any authentic legitimacy in this country, at least with more than just themselves, as Obama is elected we must be about the business of putting together a huge “Left Bloc” of small ones in each state to fight for the leftward tilt of this cross roads, this confluence of fascism and socialism amidst the economic chaos and war these times are carriers of. It is Weimar to the bone. And McCain is just the kind of spineless monopoly capitalist –blockhead imperialism shapes who could lead this country directly into fascism. Obama offers an FDR like image, in the sense that he will have to borrow from socialist leaning policies, just as Roosevelt borrowed heavily from the old CP for Social Security and Unemployment Insurance.

If somehow these American junkies permit the biggest dope dealers of US monopoly capitalism to prevent Obama from being elected, this same kind of Left bloc must opt for a more disruptive course of action. One that would help derail what would then be a cattle car to the end of Weimar 2 and into the most bitter and destructive advent of a World War 3.

Make no mistake, the recent swiping of 700 billion dollars to bail out investment banks and another 250 billion to bail out commercial banks is to save monopoly capitalism at the American people’s expense! They’re talking about “oversight” echoing Obama’s citing the Republicans obsession with “deregulation” as the main reason for the present economic crash (not a crisis but a Crash) but if we pay almost a trillion dollars for the banks we don’t need “oversight”, we need to own them. Yes, and that would be state capitalism, a distinct step forward. If the market is so hip why don’t they just continue to play in that traffic, why come to us to bail out private enterprise?

But more and more they will have to borrow aspects of social democracy to save Monopoly capitalism. (See the latest Guardian (UK) newspaper, pleading with the big bourgeoisie to ease into social democracy.) But nothing can save this certainly all but defunct oppressive economic system, from the doom of its own internal defects. Will we manage to avoid the madness and fascist violence of the collapse of the Weimar republic (pre Hitlerian Germany) by taking the step this election proposes with an Obama presidency or will we plunge headlong into an oblivion of national collapse, with McCain piloting us all into the kind of crash he wants to be known as a hero for.

Remember, the US lost that war, just as it’s losing in Afghanistan & Iraq and its image as a beacon of democracy all over the world!

Amiri Baraka
10/27/08

I Refuse To Follow These Instructions

Posted on by drumsintheglobalvillage

But my friend Malik Russell sent them to me, and the email was too good not to post. 😉

Subject: FW: NOVEMBER 5TH ETIQUETTE


Good Morning My People – After watching the final debate the other night, it dawned on me that Obama could actually win this thing. If that happens, there will be alot of people (some of our co-workers included) who will be afraid that an Obama presidency will usher in the end of days. They’ll be watching us on November 5th (the day after the election) for signs of the end times.To keep the peace and keep a lot of folks from getting nervous, I think we should develop a list of acceptable celebrations and behaviors weshould probably avoid – at least for the first few days:

1. No crying, hugging or shouting ‘Thank you Lord’ – at least not in public

2 No high-fives – at least not unless the area is clear and there are no witnesses

3 No laughing at the McCain/Palin supporters

4 No calling in sick on November 5th. They’ll get nervous if too many of us don’t show up.

5 We’re allowed to give each other knowing winks or nods in passing. Just try to keep from grinning too hard.

6. No singing loudly, We’ve come this Far By Faith (it will be acceptable to hum softly)

7. No bringing of barbeque ribs or fried chicken for lunch in the company lunchroom for at least a week (no chittlings at all) (this may make us seem to ethnic)

8. No leaving kool-aid packages at the water fountain (this might be a sign that poor folks might be getting a break through)

9. No Cupid Shuffle during breaks (this could indicate a little too much excitement)

10. Please no Moving on Up music (we are going to try to remain humble)

11. No doing the George Jefferson dance (unless you’re in your office with the door closed)

12. Please try not to yell—-BOOOO YAH!

13. Just in case you’re wondering, Doing the Running Man, cabbage patch, or a backhand spring on the highway is 100% okay.
If I’ve missed anything feel free to add to the list. I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page when Obama brings this thing home on November 5th.
Now go get your early vote on and let’s make this thing happen!!!