Race, Class, Hate, Coming Together

 Posted Nov 15, 2016 Another Example of What Comes Around, Stays Around

I'm Forwarding this to the blog as an intelligent precursor to the type of discussions that must prevail if progressive americans are going to finally lead anyone away from what the media, political parties and haters and what they want us to believe. The next revolution will be more about who we are as human beings, our commonality, our desire to love and simply raise our children, love our partners, and do the work we want and need to do in order to be a part of this society. tb

     For those who don't know Andre Taylor: his older brother Che Taylor was killed by Seattle police last February, and shortly after that Andre founded the Seattle group Not This Time.

Here are Andre's very wise thoughts in brief:

"[People say about Trump supporters] They don't like Black people. They want Latinos gone... Well, I reject that idea. I'm insulted, really, by that idea, especially from what we might consider white progressives, liberals. It's a dangerous game that you're playing. To just discount millions of people... I know what being overlooked looks like. I know what being disenfranchised looks like... As an African-American male, I'm in a position to recognize it when I see it. What I see is individuals that have given this political process time and have seen over and over again how it has not benefited them and their families and their children. They would rather blow the whole thing up and start over, and if Trump is that vehicle in which to do that, I believe they feel like we're going to take this chance for change. If we had the numbers as African-Americans, I believe we would try to do the same thing."
 

You can, and should, watch Andre's full five minute video statement here:  https://www.facebook.com/andreltaylor/videos/10155394608254622/?permPage=1

At that 1980 lecture Kwame Ture said -- and I grossly paraphrase from an imperfect and faded memory -- "When the children of those dispossessed of their land fight the children of slaves, the only group that wins is the group that dispossessed both of them in the first place, the same group that continues to discriminate and oppress them now... why are poor white people fighting poor black people over the meager crumbs offered to them by the very people that keep them both poor?"

Bernadette Devlin McAliskey would observe: 

     In Boston, in 1980, I had the privilege of hearing 1960's US civil rights leader Kwame Ture (a.k.a. Stokely Charmichael) speak along with Northern Ireland's  civil rights leader Bernadette Devlin McAliskey.
It was just four years after the Pulitzer Prize winning picture "The Soiling of Old Glory" was captured at the height of the Boston busing struggle (where Irish American kids attacked African American kids).
The picture taught us many things, not the least of which was that American patriotism is inextricably entangled with racism and that some 321 miles north of the Mason-Dixon line virulent racism thrives in chilly climes.

You can watch her discuss these themes in her 1979 Boston interview -- skip to 6:42-10:43:  http://bostonlocaltv.org/catalog/V_MKFIEIBV0KEJ4MA

     In different language, at a different time, these people were stating what Andre Taylor stated yesterday. This should never be interpreted as an argument for ignoring racism, or even an argument for somehow making racism a secondary concern. It is an argument for understanding racism -- most certainly institutional racism (a term first developed by Kwame Ture) -- not as a product of human failing, or inherent tribalism, or simple hatred, but rather as a product of those who seek to gain and maintain economic advantage. It is also an argument for confronting and fighting the people that eat many a fatted calf and not the ones that get some extra leftover grain.

     People often argue abstract and theoretical positions, and some will say "Well that's all fine and well to debate class, but the racist, homophobic, misogynists are real and they want to hurt us and take our rights from us." But what is abstract and theoretical became very real for me and 15 other black and white teenagers/very young adults in 1971 on an American Friends Service Committee work camp in Fremont, Michigan. That summer we came to rebuild the "homes" of a small community of African Americans who arrived in Newaygo County in the late 1930's and early 1940's, at the peak of the Great Migration of African Americans from the south. They came to work in the Gerber Products factory, and were settled in houses which the US government started to build but stopped when World War II started, leaving people to live underground in tar papered concrete basements with no running water, no toilets, no sewage system.

     Newaygo County was less than 1% African American, and we were faced with the most in-your-face virulent racism on a daily basis: motorcycle gangs that attacked us and tried hard to provoke violent confrontations, we were thrown out of bars for inter-racial dancing, local construction workers volunteering with us refused to let the African American campers into their cars, and attacks on the school we slept at. There was nothing abstract or theoretical about the white Fremont resident who once came to our defense and had his head caved in with a very large open-end wrench. What to do in a situation like that: fight back, debate intersectional politics, lecture on institutional racism, challenge folks to explore their implicit biases (actually 99.9% of the bias was quite explicit), explain the Quaker principles of non-violence, boycott the work, run away to safety? We did what was surely the hardest thing: stayed and worked for nine weeks, strictly adhering to the principles of non-violence we committed to that summer, and every day learning new ways to navigate the racism that confronted us and constrained our work. It was hard work to get the local white construction workers just to eat lunch with both the black and white kids in the group. Eventually those workers let everyone ride in their trucks, they listened to the black kid from Mississippi tell his story of watching armed Klansmen break into his home to lynch his father (because the kid was the first in his area to go to an all white school; his dad was saved by his mom and a shotgun), they came to our parties, and hugged a black person for the first time at the end on nine weeks when it was time to go. These "rednecks" donated their tools and sweat to rebuild the homes of African Americans in their community. Everyone benefited and grew that summer, except the racist bikers who never stopped threatening and doing violence -- but at the end of the summer we defeated them in a way that violence never could have.

     Sometimes you have to meet people where they are as opposed to forcibly dragging them to where you are (or think you are). There was no point fighting the people who got some extra leftover grain.

   posted 

 When the children and grandchildren of those workers from Newaygo County lost their homes and savings after 2008, and no one came to help them rebuild, 67% of them voted for Trump. And, racist or not, I still think they would come to the aid of their African American neighbors like their forebear's did 45 years ago.

     Bernadette Devlin McAliskey gave a lecture two months ago which revisits these issues 37 years after she spoke in Boston. The first half of the lecture focuses on the current conditions in Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland peace process. She argues "protect us from the con-men who have corporatized and sell the Northern Ireland peace process to the rest of the world." Very worth watching.

The second half -- from time 32:55 on -- is about how people end up turning against each other in battles for the equality of injustice, the equality of poverty, and the equality of misconception, i.e., battles which end up being about how to make us suffer equally rather than battles to enfranchise and empower all.

Mandatory viewing at a time like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42yJcDQSsRQ

     Some thoughts on how we can do the very necessary work in the months ahead so that someone else doesn't have to re-post these same videos and arguments 37 years from now?

Another example pf American Media's Shameless Propaganda Ploys

From 2016

Has anyone ever heard of Willets Point? American business and politicians respond to blight, homeless, and business failures, throwing money away. There must be more of these, I betcha.

I always wonder what happened to Americas ghettoes and industrial stagnation, do you?

http://m.mic.com/articles/138741/espn-tried-to-shame-cuba-on-poverty-and-it-backfired-spectacularly 

What Comes Around, Goes Around, Again

 written October 2016

One thing about this election and at least one of the candidates, maybe you can guess who it is, is who's behind him. Oh, I know there lots of people out there frustrated not only with the political process, I don't know how you can't be, but many people who probably haven't cared who or what, except for criticism of Obama, immigrants, and Muslims, but also who have been patiently waiting for the King, any King, or Queen( Sarah Palin) to want to become President.

The establishment parties are certainly rocking since people who traditionally voted independent or not at all have decided to play a part.
I wonder though about who is supporting Trump, that is, not monetarily but militarily. Since he's shown many faces, I wonder who his faces will be as his staff. I've seen his spokespeople, and they are as amorphous as the rest of the other candidate's spokespersons. In the meantime, America looks about as vulnerable as ever, its weaknesses, it's lies, its puffy nature, deadly as hell to all foreigner citizens both here and abroad.
It's also hard to imagine the future presidential staff of Bernie Sanders, though MSNBC worries while Fox news denies he is even a viable candidate, either because they want so badly to believe Hilary's juggernaut is unbeatable or they really want to take her down in the general election.
The issues that won't go away: Hilary's emails, where "most" though apparently not all of Hilary's emails were classified after the fact,Ted Cruz'z natural citizenship, Bernie Sanders' democratic socialism, and Donald Trump's real religion (Has anyone ever seen him go to church?) Not that it matters to me but even my non-superior being belief suspects phonies when I see them, even religious phonies.

Those who believe

Those who believe they're successful because of the powerful and inspiring voices of their parents saying, "you can be whatever you want," appealing to magical incantations of hope, to become the chosen ones.

Immigrants are nothing but new settlers, new plymouth rocks or jamestowns, bringing not hope but old religions and false beliefs to the country that wishes it could be free but isnt.

The little country that could try evolving to the glutton that would grow beyond its borders, to expand beyond the simplicity of peace and prosperity, to lose everything to the belief might makes right and right is mighty blind, deaf, and mean.

Welcome you all to hell on earth. Come and appeal your cause.

Politics is nothing but the management of resources through working for what you can pay for as determined by the owners of those resources. That's all. Not about what fools think god wants, what presidents want, what billionaires want. It's about what you actually want, need, or cherish. It's nothing about GREED.

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The new blind men

 It appears that for the first time the content you can't read is a prose poem/rant that was written long ago about the stifling of life by the armies of the night, our own governments, taking our freedoms from the moment we are born.

A complaint was made by one of those lessor blind men, or I suppose, a woman, who are trying to pretend we are a nation of freedom loving souls but first we have to cull out what freedoms we want to promote.

I am an anti-fascist, an anti-authoritarian, and ever since i was seventeen standing around in the war room of intelligence/op-plans i have not recognized the right of the United States to be the Supreme Leader of the world.

Today it fosters genocide and colonialism in the mid-east. Two centuries ago, it fostered genocide and colonialism (both forms of slavery and white supremacy) within its own changing borderlines.

In between centuries, America.

Apology

 

(Before I go further, I assume you, the readers, have noticed the Warning at the entrance to this blog. I apologize to those who will refrain from coming anymore because by having to sign in ( i have to as well) maybe seems somewhat intimidating. It's about Google and about the fact that now to thwart freedom of expression by calling it something else is all too easy for nut cases who feel threatened by talk and miss the point entirely. Freedom of expression is being renounced all over america today and if you hear any politician decrying that fact, let me know, and I'll send them the anti-hate freedom award. But I'll keep on writing, though after this election it wont be much use to anybody. Just don't vote, organize, resist, and love, protect yourselves, your family and everyone else AND prepare for the worst because that's what we're going to get, no matter who our so-called leaders are.)

Am I the cynical one when liberal media analysts talk about soldier love, and there being no greater love than a soldier who goes to war in a foreign country and protects himself and his fello and fella soldiers from harm? Is that truly heroic and is it true love?

Why can't I accept the principal that what we are now all accepting is the glorification of kicking ass? It seems to me that we have as a national theme the same as most street gangs. Allegiance to a gang or a country is not significantly different. I hate to sound like that fuck face president from the NRA but the whole street cred mentality needs to be thrown out the window. The notion that all of us have talent of some kind that could be exploited if we could get it on TV or in a combat zone is mostly ridiculous.

I'm an average guy that did not buy into the American Dream because I would rather save my dream for when I sleep and see what comes out of that. To pretend that everyday life is the working out of some illusionary ideal probably helped Freud (remember him) or Carl Jung be driven crazy with delusions of idealization.

So what about that soldier love? Living in America for many people is worse than the worst Afghanistan combat zone. More people die over the weekend in some cities than all the soldiers in the combat zones, so who's living the life of friendly fire? The US spends trillions of dollars protecting it's soldiers with the finest weaponry, while the people who finance it all live it up on the proceeds from the manufacture and sales of weapons everywhere. It's a form of worship that most gods would be envious of. There used to be a word to describe the anti-sacred-sacrilegious, that's it.

We know that the Jews, the Arabs, the Catholics, the Protestants, the civilians, no matter how powerful the armies that conquered them or no matter how cruel their own armies, we've survived it all, probably giving more credence to the Buddhist principal, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone. Buddha or John Mellencamp. We're one of the most durable species on earth despite our tendency to entertain illusions, not only through our choice of drug usage but through our persistence in making up beliefs that have no basis in reality, and worse, fighting over those beliefs. If in the animal world dominance and submissiveness is the anti-thesis to our seeking of freedom, then freedom is only the absence of dominance-submissive behavior. We invent guns, weapons, wars, all that shit, simply because one on one, no one has much of an advantage over another.

Look at it this way. Put a Vietnamese toddler in the ring with a young Muhammed Ali and what happens? Ali throws up his hands, laughs, and picks up the baby, and says you never called me Nigger. Then put George Wallace ( he's an old now dead racist democratic governor of Alabama) in with Ali and guess what, George will bring a gun because that's the only way he can win. But even then, Ali will throw up his hands, laugh, and say, "since you got a gun, I'm knockin you out in one."

There are a million legal teams working on every aspect of government, corporate and personal limitations on freedom while most people sit around and watch idiot tv on a small screen telephone.

Meanwhile, people say they're afraid of walking, running, eating, sleeping in their own neighborhoods but do you think they get the idea that it is their neighborhood and if enough people get out and are visible, run together, walk and talk together that the nuisances, which you can never get rid of because social and economic stratification is everywhere, will either leave or shut up.

Government is patriarchy, there is nothing to learn from it. It doesn't matter whether there is a woman leader, government and religion are not feminized, if there is a natural, less abrasive genetic code embedded in women. 

Women will be the heart of real change, just not American or western women raised in the belly of ambition and vengeance.

 Revolution is not anything that happens outside of each of us but is more the changes that are inside us, inside our heads.

Although Darwin's evolutionary theory depended more on natural selection of physical characteristics, the Lamark theory of improvised characteristics utilized and evolving from one generation to the next may be more appropriate for our socialization processes.

Our beliefs and need for information is in a constant state of ambience so when things happen to challenge our beliefs, new information can cause old beliefs to become non-useful, and we can make changes to a new way of thinking.

Of course, some revolutions are merely changes in social power relationships without significant changes in the belief of whether or not that power relationship is necessary for the social order to maintain equilibrium.

No scholarship

One shouldnt have to be a scholar to understand basic nuances of justice, equality, and humanism nor even faith, hope and charity but it appears that's what one has to do.

Eight years ago we were bombarded with the ignorance of the most ignorant of the candidates running for president, and though people rightly rejected the old standard war horse of the democratic party, at the same time, voting for the lessor of two evils for most voting for trump turned into a national farce.

The media, fear of the left, fear of black people (all immigrants painted with the same brush), all contributed to this fiasco. But, rather than breathe a sigh of relief in 2020, the democrats continued to be in retrograde when it came to prosecuting the two-state solution in lieu of defending the fascistic Patriot Act. 

The patriotidiot act has dominated US foreign policy since its enactment. A document defending any right leaning faction, party, or government in every nation on earth, basing foreign policy on wealth, resources, allies in the war on terror. America supported the extreme religious nihilists of afghanistan, israel, iraq, saudi arabis, florida, venezuela, just to name a few, in order to justify humanitarian sanctions, war, and weaponization of right wing militias, militaries, and dictators around the world.

America is as fascist as the politics it represents. It fosters the same divisive international politics as the domestic fascists foster the divisive domestic policies. Thats all fascists do, affect the elimination of equal power, socialist, communal, naturalistic ideals and principles.

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Before thee, we kneel

Before thee, we kneel.

Who would have guessed that one of the most prejudicial issues over the century, anti-semitism (slavery, fascism being an example of two others) would be the pivotal issue to bring down civilization, if we can define "civilization" as the actual realization of a cultural milieu. Meaning that whether good or bad, most likely and common being good and bad in relative ratio.

The fall begins in the modern age, world war 2, the holocaust, the culmination of the western world's almost universal prejudice of judaism. Historically, like slavery, the roots go back to the medieval fears of race, religion, and power.

As we, the left, would have it, israel deserved to be punished for its seventy five years of ethnic cleansing, stealing of land, oppression of the innocent in lieu of the not so innocent idea that jews are the chosen people of an empty god. Although international humanitarian law outlines and defines what may or may not be genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other far breaching abuses of power within the international community, it does not define punishment, mainly because punishment is not within the jurisdiction of non-state tribunals and certainly not tribunals without enforcement capabilities. 

Enforcement of crimes against humanity are the exclusive right of might makes right' as we see in the two main worldwide conflicts in the world today, and their main adversarial combatants-Russia/ukraine and the tri-USA/israel/ terror factions. These two wars symbolize all the main contradictions of rising fascist states. All parties in these conflicts display anti-democratic, anti-freedom, pro-fascist doctrines as their method for success. Depending on which one you may "talk" to.

Israel on the other hand takes the hard line, we are not above the law, we are the law.

Before these national leaders of the most powerful on earth, we, the kneelers, must continue to supplicate ourselves.

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Democracy in Action

If we're not going to have a type of democratic system where politicians actually represent their constituents and still have realistic differences with their politician brothers and sisters AND compromise and work out real solutions to real problems, then we need to go to an alternative.

The alignment of special populist interests against the wealthy interests that currently roam the halls of congress and state houses is necessary. Call these populist interests unions, lobbies, or any other name that represents their goals.

Tenant's unions, workers unions, medical/healthcare consumer unions

Their goals will be the issues that politicians neglect or believe that prior legislation whether current or past has adequately addressed citizen demands.

Recent DOJ lawsuit against RealPage shows real estate corporations are banding together to keep rental prices high during downturns and raising rates together so diminishing competition within the communty. Rents are based on what the market will stand and not on what condition houses and apartments are in.

City, county, and state governments listen to these corporate entities as experts so are complicit in the reality.

We weep over the Trail of Tears,

Injustice is what we scream. 

There's the Grapes of Wrath, the Jungle, the Octopus, the Death Ship

Injustice we scream,

Scenes of horror in gaza pass by us on the tv screen,

Homes and mosques and hospitals and schools turned into rubble,

An eye for an eye we scream.

Dachau, hiroshima, my lai, wounded knee, World War three,

Justified we scream

Deportation, migration, starvation, destitution

Freedom for america, charity for the poor of the world.

Torture in 1945 is no more justified than torture in 2024.

Forty thousand dead, the dead will rise up in the living,

A circle of war is complete. Go round and round, 

Israel creates the army of revenge 

Of children of martyrs they will come, grown in the belly of the beast.

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Could have left it

Could have left how you found it without going to the front lines and confound it with all your strife

Its hard to figure why hamas and hezbollah and even israel, russia and ukraine

Go to all that trouble to eke out their form of paradise when it seems they could have left it like they found it

And itd be better than than the way they made it.

Thats good for america too.

The age of exploration was more like the age of domination

The christian soldiers, getting everyone ready for the apocalypse, and it still hasnt come yet,

It just looks as if they could have left what they discovered to already be,

Left it alone, the way it was when they found it, instead they stand around with their armies, believin gods on their side,

Languishing outside the gates of hell or auschwitz or gulag 17 or black sites, black holes with no names, or borders where youre either locked in or locked out.

Were all standing around, mired in our histories of violence.

Pointing fingers, innocent though we believe we're on the front lines, but only in our minds, 

Every day we say we die for our cause.

Retaliation for what?

Bombs shake beirut. Israel is telling what they'll do and hamas and hellbollah, empty threats of retaliation,

No one wants to die, everyone wants to be on the front line.

Stone age warriors, new age technology.

Proxy wars with Iran, Russia, In Ukraine, Israel, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq. Political sanctions against cuba, venezuela, yemen, china,

There is ample evidence that israel has been terrorizing the entire region for decades with overflies, indiscriminate strikes on bordering nations, such as lebanon, syria, and virtuallycontrols the southern border region shared with egypt, one can now ask about the security lapse on October 7th.

What about the security lapse on October 7th?

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Where should we stand

If we say war is never justified in a truly humanitarian world where every human being is no more no less valued than any other, then we are on the side of history thats aligned with all the humanitarian, social justice ideals ever thought or believed.

That puts us in the bullseye of the rest who control us as well as control all the reasons for war, capitalism, and fascism.

Israel along with its torturing ally, the united states, have redefined warfare in the past seven decades. The imperial arm of the us over the decades by cia sponsored guerrilla operations throughout the world, the weaponization of "friendly" terrorists (such as al Quada, taliban, shite, shia) in order to further worldwide resistance to any other national aggression, and the state authorized development of torture and black sites to coerce information. 

The weaponization of allies has now become an outed foreign policy supported by nearly all politicians, as well as citizens.

Progressive politics has become a straw dog, a mere ideological paper tiger, to provide the semblance of balance in american politics.

The fact that kamala harris has the support of moderate republicans ( those are the ones who, along with right democrats have masterminded the decades long slow and obstructed democratic legislative process) and former right wing, fascist republican officials like dick cheney, simply means we are already locked into another four years of backward thinking.

There are only two choices. Those who will vote for either one of the major candidates will get the same result from either one and those who make the choice to not support either of these candidates not only stand together but remain strong in solidarity with humanitarian interests rather than nationalistic ones.

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