I’m in Washington, DC and it’s August 24. Before I head out to the March on Washington: The 50th Anniversary Remix, a few thoughts.
A couple of months ago, I had decided not to come. It was, I thought, shaping up as an exercise in nostalgia. Not that I'm not nostalgic. My first political activism came around the Civil Rights Movement. The first really big fight I can remember having my Moms (and the last one I lost) broke out when she wouldn't let my 13 –year- old ass travel to the 1963 March from rural Northwest Connecticut. But the few dozen Big Marches I’ve humped down to DC for in the decades since then have blunted the sentimentality.
Two things changed my mind: the Supreme Court decision trashing the voting rights act and the mass outrage triggered by the “not guilty” verdict for George Zimmerman in the murder of Trayvon Martin. These two developments have objectively changed the character of today’s demonstration.
As the blatantly preplanned and coordinated effort to disenfranchise students at traditionally Black colleges in NC shows, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act is the starting gun in an amped-up campaign to restrict the franchise as much as possible to white folks.
Those leftists who would argue that this is a non-issue, given the bought-and-paid-for nature of elections in our bourgeois democracy do so in defiance of the entire history of this country. The famous compromise in the drafting of the US Constitution which defined a slave as 3/5 of a man for purposes of determining a state’s population,
August 24, 2013
March on Washington: The 50th Anniversary Remix
July 17, 2013
Black NJ: Over 1,000 marchers in Newark demands federal Civil Rights charges against Zimmerman
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When the usual "hard-core" 18-25 People's Organization for Progress members and supporters who begin every rally or march became a spirited picketline of more than 50 nearly an hour before an event is scheduled to begin, you know that the event answers a felt need in the community.
When the picket demanding Justice for Trayvon Martin at the intersection Broad & Market in downtown Newark on Sunday quickly filled up the entire sidewalk on one side of the intersection, Newark police practically begged POP to take it to the streets! Before 3:00 PM, nearly 500 marchers were lined up on Broad Street to march down to the Federal Building. By the conclusion of the march and rally, the Newark Star Ledger estimated 700 participants, so I would suggest that 1,000 marchers is probably a conservative evaluation (see Hundreds Rally in Newark… for the Star Ledger's report on Sunday's march and rally).
Reflecting on the NAACP's call for federal Civil Rights charges, People's Organization for Progress has a bit of experience with the strengths and weaknesses of this tactic. In 1999, when the State of NJ refused to even consider prosecuting the Orange, NJ police officers responsible for the murder of aspiring rapper Earl Faison (in what the Federal Prosecutor would later refer to as a "stairwell of torture" in the Orange PD building), the only option available was charging the officers with violating Mr. Faison's civil rights.
Remember, that judicially, murder, manslaughter and homicide are state crimes. There is no federal equivalent, so the closest to justice that the Faison family could hope for was that a literal conspiracy of wilding by the cops would result in a few short jail terms.
Similarly for the family of Trayvon Martin, a federal civil rights conviction against George Zimmerman simply means he is not blameless, as the acquittal in Sanford court indicates the jurors believe. A greater victory, more justice for Mr. Martin's family would probably be the repeal of racist "Stand Your Ground" laws in Florida and throughout the US.
Interestingly, Newark mayor "Hollywood" Booker has gone out of his way to distance himself from those angered by Zimmerman's acquittal (see Booker, other NJ figures…). Apparently, part of his US Senate campaign involves making himself so "non-offensive" to those he sees as his constituents that, by comparison, NYC's racist Mayor Mike is an absolute radical! Hopefully this will make Ras Baraka's election certain…
Interestingly, Newark mayor "Hollywood" Booker has gone out of his way to distance himself from those angered by Zimmerman's acquittal (see Booker, other NJ figures…). Apparently, part of his US Senate campaign involves making himself so "non-offensive" to those he sees as his constituents that, by comparison, NYC's racist Mayor Mike is an absolute radical! Hopefully this will make Ras Baraka's election certain…
May 18, 2013
Veterans and the Future of the Peace Movement
[Today, I attended a day-long Conference on the Veterans Peace Movement. Activist from vets groups, military families and other sections of the anti-war/peace movement gathered as part of an ongoing process of brainstorming directions for the movement in the coming period. The excellent short speech posted here concisely lays out the magnitude of the challenges facing that movement.]
Ben Chitty (left) with Dayl Wise
Veterans & the Politics of Peace
by Ben Chitty
What do
you think "veterans against war" or "veterans for peace"
really mean? Seems like it should be simple, but it’s not. When
David Cline, Clarence Fitch, and Mike Gold revived the NYC metro area
chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War in the 1980s, people used
to ask, "What war?" or "Why not just 'Vietnam Veterans
Against War'?"
You can
slice and dice the concepts "veteran against war" or "veteran
for peace" in many ways. Here’s one approach. You start by asking
where you want to go and what that will take – what would it take
to stop this war, whatever war that happens to be; what would it take
to stop our own wars, the wars our country fights; what would it take
to stop all war, to make war obsolete. You can say it in positive
terms: make peace with our enemy; make war our last national policy
option; make over our society to eliminate the causes of war -- end
oppression and exploitation, so that war can be abolished. That’s a
tall order. But look around you -- you can spot someone at almost
every point on this spectrum. And every one you see -- every one of
us -- is against war and for peace.
I do
not have to tell you how many ways you can become sick of war.
Brutality, hypocrisy, impunity. Misogyny and homophobia. Bad
medicine, environmental degradation. Killing poor people to protect
the rich, or people of color to preserve white skin privilege. The
military industrial complex, which must be the most wasteful economic
engine ever built. Add up the cost of the military, calculate how
many schools could be built, or bridges repaired, or superfund sites
cleaned up, for the price of one aircraft carrier -- about $13.6
billion dollars for the USS Gerald Ford, now scheduled to float out
of dry dock next November -- that’s almost a full year’s budget
for the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science
Foundation combined.
So,
what about stopping one particular war? Actually, we have no idea.
To
begin with, it's hard even to imagine stopping a war before it
starts. Many, maybe even most, Americans opposed the Spanish-American
War and the annexation of the Philippines, the first World War, the
first Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq. All these wars started anyway.
So much for democracy.
Some
wars don’t stop until someone wins. As long as you believe you’re
winning, you won’t be much interested in stopping the war.
Stalemates are different. There are two key questions. Can one side
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May 11, 2013
Black NJ: People's Organization for Progress on the FBI & NJ State Police attack on Assata Shakur
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| FBI/NJ State police put up a new billboard advertising their call for an extrajudicial hit against our sister Assata Shakur
This past week, many movement activists were shocked when our sister, Assata Shakur, was suddenly placed atop an until then unknown FBI "terrorist" list. In response, at noon on Friday May 10 People's Organization For Progress, the New Black Panther Party and a host of allied organizations and individuals held a press conference in at the Rodino Federal Building in Newark, NJ. The statement that follows was read by Lawrence Hamm, NJ state chairman for POP:
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The People's Organization For Progress (POP) calls upon the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to remove Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard) from its Most Wanted Terrorists List. She does not belong on the list because Ms. Shakur was never charged nor convicted of an act of domestic or international terrorism.
To place her on such a list is fundamentally unjust. It is a perversion of justice and involves the ex post facto application of terrorist laws and definitions of terrorism that were not in existence or applied to her case at the time of her arrest and conviction.
Furthermore, she did not commit the crime she was accused of. She was placed on the list because her conviction connected her to the murder of a police officer. However, evidence in her case shows that she could not have shot and killed that officer. She became a fugitive because given the circumstances of her case, the atmosphere of repression, and the racism of the criminal justice system she could not get justice in this country and to remain here may have cost her life.
The move to place her on the list and the doubling of her bounty to $2 million has little to do with justice and everything to do with politics. It is an opportunistic attempt to use the criminal justice system to score political points in this highly charged post Boston bombing environment.
Placing Assata Shakur on the terrorists list when she was not convicted of a "terrorist act" is in essence falsely accusing her of a crime that she did not commit. It is the abandonment of the law in the name of enforcing the law.
Like the war in Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, preemptive strikes, and the abandonment of international law, it is the establishment of a false premise as a rationale for violent action, which has no legal basis but for which political support may be imagined or conjured up. Placing Assata Shakur on the terrorists list sets a dangerous precedent.
With the false premise established what will be next? Will Cuba be given the ultimatum to give up Shakur like the Afghanistan government was told to give up Osama Bin Laden before the US invasion of that country? Will there be a drone strike of Shakur's supposed residence in Cuba? Will Navy Seal Team "7" be sent on a covert mission to assassinate Assata Shakur who is an American citizen?
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| Zayid Muhammad of the New Black Panthers introduces Newark elder Amiri Baraka, who also spoke eloquently at the press conferenc
By identifying Shakur as a terrorist the FBI is taking the terrorists list and making it a "political enemies" list, which is an instrument of state terror. And why not? This fits in perfectly with unjust and illegal trillion dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, extraordinary renditions, black site secret prisons in foreign lands, torture, assassination of US citizens, military courts, secret trials, Guantanamo, elimination of habeas corpus, indefinite detention, government domestic spying, arbitrary arrests, police brutality, racial profiling, stop and frisk, mass incarceration, school to prison pipeline, suppression of dissent, COINTELPRO type operations, ignoring the Constitution, trashing the Bill of rights, and trampling upon our civil liberties.
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And the New Jersey State Police who shot up Newark and killed innocent people during the rebellion. The New Jersey State Police who for years engaged in the worst forms of racial profiling. The New Jersey State Police, a department so rife with racism that the federal government had to put it under a "master" to force it to reform its racist ways.
With this precedent the rights of all Americans are placed in greater jeopardy. Now, anyone can be deemed a terrorist, not because this was proven in a court of law but by fiat, proclamation or declaration by the President, US Attorney General, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, or some other agency of the federal government.
And this can be done not just for transgressions of the present. It can be done retroactively for sins of the past, ten, twenty, thirty, and forty years ago. If the government doesn't like someone just put them on the terrorist list.
Who are the $2 million pieces of silver for? Are they for enterprising US citizens? No. Assata Shakur has been given political asylum in Cuba. This pot of gold is to entice elements within Cuban Society to violate the laws and policies of the Cuban government.
The FBI and company hope that in Cuba there are corrupt persons within the police, or criminal elements, or people opposed to the government who will take the bait and do this bit of subcontracting work and keep some of the heat off the bosses in the US.
They hope that there are Hamid Kharzais in Cuba who would like to have bags of money delivered to them on a monthly basis. "Bring Assata Shakur to us and you to can be a millionaire." Dead or alive has not been specified.
The placing of Assata Shakur on the terrorist list while portrayed as a noble act in the attempt to get justice for a slain police officer is in fact a shameful act of revenge, opportunism, political manipulation, and authoritarianism. It is part and parcel of a corrosive trend eating away at the democratic processes and institutions in our country for half a century and which has accelerated since 9/11.
Assata Shakur should not be on the terrorist list. She should be removed from that list just as Nelson Mandela was removed from that list several years ago. When the threat of terrorism and the terrorist label is misused in this manner the victims of real acts of terror are dishonored.
(Fire on the Mountain thanks POP Corresponding-Secretary Ingrid Hill for her photographs from the press conference/picket at the Rodino Office Building)
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April 18, 2013
PotW: To The Memory Of Albert Einstein
TO THE MEMORY OF ALBERT EINSTEIN
by Leibel Bergman
The thunderbolt within the grain of sand--
This is the power that the human hand
Has wrested from our ignorance and fear,
This climax of our yet few thousand years
Of work and strife. This is the promised land
We touch across the ocean of our tears.
How dark the night that was our painful past,
How bright the morning that we see at last,
How slight the bonds that hold us from the shore,
The curse of greed, the evil deeps of war;
These too will vanish though they yet hang fast,
The thief, the slayer, the inquisitor.
All these shall pass: yes, we shall end the blight
Of ignorance, for once for all, the fright
Of children, and the power of the lie,
The hunger, and the long despairing sigh.
We rout our darkness with the speed of light,
Set with our hand a candle in the sky.
1960
from:
Will We Remember?
Chicago, 1982
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April 13, 2013
"Free The Land!"
Chokwe Lumumba addresses 30th annual Black Workers for Justice MLK Banquet
This year, Black Workers for Justice held their 30th Annual Martin Luther King Support for Labor Banquet. This historic dinner actually represents more than three decades of activism. BWfJ began as the result of a battle initiated by Black women workers at a K-Mart in Rocky Mount, NC in 1981. Your correspondent has been to more than a few of BWfJ's MLK dinners over the years, but this is the first time I've attended two years in a row.
Award recipients at BWFJ 30th Annual "MLK Support for Labor Banquet
While last year's banquet was a serious "must attend" affair for a People's Organization for Progress member such as myself (POP's chairman, Lawrence Hamm was the 2012 keynote speaker), the event this year was even more exciting. The spirited response of the crowd to BWfJ's exhilarating Fruit of Labor singing ensemble was palpable.
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| Ajamu Dillahunt, founding member and elder of BWFJ, grooves to the Fruit of Labor's excellent performance |
The thrilling spirit of this exciting event was evident in poetry and dance as well as the singing of the Fruit of Labor and others. Erin Byrd read an excellent poem and Laprince Smith led the gathering in singing the Black National Anthem (Lift Every Voice and Sing).
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| Jackson, MS City Councilman, and Mayoral Candidate, Chokwe Lumumba was the Keynote Speaker. |
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April 10, 2013
Poem of the Month: Democratic Womanism
DEMOCRATIC WOMANISM
Alice Walker
You ask me why I
smile
when you
tell me you intend
in the
coming national elections
to hold your
nose
and vote for
the lesser of two evils.
There are
more than two evils out there,
is one
reason I smile.
Another is
that our old buddy Nostradamus
comes to
mind, with his fearful
400 year old
prophecy: that our world
and theirs
too
(our
"enemies" – lots of kids included there)
will end (by
nuclear nakba or holocaust)
in our
lifetime. Which makes the idea of elections
and the
billions of dollars wasted on them
somewhat
fatuous.
A Southerner
of Color,
my people
held the vote
very dear
while
others, for centuries,
merely
appeared to play
with it.
One thing I
can assure
you of is
this:
I will never
betray such pure hearts
by voting
for evil
even if it
were microscopic
which, as
you can see in any newscast
no matter
the slant,
it is not.
I want
something else;
a different
system
entirely.
One not seen
on this
earth
for
thousands of years. If ever.
Democratic Womanism.
Notice how
this word has "man" right in the middle of it?
That’s one
reason I like it. He is right there, front and center. But he is surrounded.
I want to
vote and work for a way of life
that honors
the feminine;
a way that
acknowledges
the theft of
the wisdom
female and
dark Mother leadership
might have
provided our spaceship
all along.
I am not
thinking
of a talking
head
kind of gal:
happy to be
mixing
it up
with the
baddest
bad boys
on the
planet
her eyes a
slit
her mouth a
zipper.
No, I am
speaking of true
regime
change.
Where women
rise
to take
their place
en masse
at the helm
of earth’s
frail and failing ship;
where each
thousand years
of our
silence
is examined
with regret,
and the
cruel manner in which our values
of
compassion and kindness
have been
ridiculed
and
suppressed
brought to
bear on the disaster
of the
present time.
The past
must be examined closely, I believe, before we can leave
it there.
I am
thinking of Democratic, and, perhaps
Socialist,
Womanism.
For who else
knows so deeply
how to share
but Mothers
and
Grandmothers? Big sisters
and Aunts?
To love
and adore
both female
and male?
Not to
mention those in between.
To work at
keeping
the entire
community
fed,
educated
and safe?
Democratic
womanism,
Democratic
Socialist
Womanism,
would have
as its icons
such fierce
warriors
for good as
Vandana
Shiva
Aung San Suu
Kyi,
Wangari
Maathai
Harriet
Tubman
Yoko Ono
Frida Kahlo
Angela Davis
&
Barbara Lee:
With new
ones always rising, wherever you look.
[This pretty much speaks for itself. Thanks to Meizhu Lui for submitting it.]
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