The Aftermath

 

The jury has decided on the Zimmerman trial. Now, we should continue to fight for truth. The reactionaries lied and predicted massive riots in America. We know that to be a lie since most folks have been peaceful. Human beings have every right to protest about injustices in our community and to protest for the justice of the late Trayvon Martin. Many cities across the nation in San Francisco, New York, Sanford, Florida, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other places of the world have folks protesting for justice for the family of Trayvon Martin. Trayvon Martin is not here, but his memory lives on in us. We can respect his memory by doing the right thing. We can advocate ending unjust laws like Stand Your Ground. We can work to build up our communities and fight against violence including police brutality. We can go out and mentor the young as a means to fulfill their true potential. We should boycott in firm strategic ways that deal with ALEC or those that benefit from George Zimmerman's agenda. We may lost a battle, but we will not lose the war. In the end, we will be victorious. Yet, we have to work and work. We have a responsibility in the world to focus our energy to radically change society. We all realize the disparities that exist in the criminal justice system. We see many brothers and sisters in jail for huge time for Stand Your Ground related issues. We have seen the War on Drugs harm our communities harshly. Also, many humans of many ethnicities and backgrounds protested against the verdict and wanted justice for Trayvon Martin. That truth ought to be known here. Robert Zimmerman has the same agenda as his brother. He is a hypocrite by complaining about vigilantes, but his brother acted as a known vigilante. He ignores the corrupt system in the judicial sphere and other spheres of the nation as an excuse to justify his brother's actions. His tweet outlines the views of Robert. In the final analysis, folks like Robert could care less about our people. They only want blacks to be docile, compromising, weak, and aligned with the system. The system is corrupt to the core, so we should make a better system in the replacement of the current evil system. PS. One of Robert's biggest lies is that he said that America has the best judicial system in the world. Remember Lester Chambers being assaulted on stage for just singing a song in favor of Trayvon Martin recently.


Both the Republicans and the Democrats are dealing with the student loan rate issues. Millions of U.S. students are preparing to return to college this fall of 2013. The huge burden of students is being increased now. July 1 came with the expiration of the federal student loan law. This law deals with the interest rate on subsidized loans. This is regularly sent to low and middle income students. These loans have doubled. They were raised from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. The rate increase affects nearly 7.5 million students as said by the White House. Now, we know that some in the GOP are extremists. Other Democrats want to roll back the draconian rate increase by passing another law on federal student loans. The catch is that this bipartisan measure will further cut subsidies and tie loan rates to the vagaries of the financial markets. Critics believe that the rates will be even higher than 6.8 percent. One provision under discussion will eliminate the difference in interest rates on subsidize and unsubsidized student loans. This ends a policy that is intended to provide low income young people with access to education. So, the tentative deal worked out by the Senate negotiators is trying to make interest on all federal student loans tied to the rate on ten year government bonds. Student loan rates in effect will be capped at 8.25 percent for undergraduates and 9.25 prevent for graduates. These exorbitant rates (which is the same level charged by credit card companies) have been tentatively approved by Democratic negotiators (and are in line with the White House's latest budget proposal). Interest rates were rising sharply over the past two months. That means that borrowing costs are to be higher for students who take on new loans. If the interest rates on U.S. government debt were to return to the levels seen in the 1990's, then borrowing costs for undergraduates would jump to over 8 percent. It is reactionary to allow the vagaries of the market and Wall Street to handle the power of students to finance their education. We know that the attacks on students are real, especially at low income families. There has been an attack on key social programs. We know that on last Thursday, the House of Representatives passed a version of the farm bill will exclude $743 billion in food stamps in preparation for sharply cutting the nutrition program upon which 48 million people—one in six Americans—depend. The White House wants to delay for one year the implementation of a legal requirement for businesses to provide health insurance to employees working full time as part of the health care overhaul. We know that millions of people remain uninsured under the cost cutting scheme and tens of millions are more being saddled with higher premiums and fewer benefits. That is why a single payer system is better than what we have now. The two business parties are dealing with student loans and food stamps. Their actions affect millions of working people. When we look at the bigger picture, we see the pattern. The pattern is that the Republicans express more extreme positions and then the baseline of the Democrat shift more to the right (and proposes even deeper cuts than they have initially proposed). Overall, the aristocracy harbors hatred of the masses of the people and wants to negatively harm student loan rates, food stamps, and health insurance. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke wants to have Wall Street to have near zero interest rates and virtually free credit for Wall Street via a speech. We see a huge rise in stock price, corporate prices, and CEO pay.  Stocks hit new all-time records on Thursday in response to Bernanke’s speech. Meanwhile, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, two of the largest US banks, posted record profits. JPMorgan made $6.1 billion in the second quarter, up 32 percent from a year ago, while Wells Fargo took in $5.27 billion, up 20 percent. The federal student loan program gives the government billions of dollars in profit. There is over 1.1 trillion dollars in student loan debt. Tuition has grown as well. Even Elizabeth Warren's Students Loan Fairness Act is better than the status quo. The bill would force the Federal Reserve to fund federal Stafford loans through the US Department of Education at an annual interest rate of just 0.75% — the discount rate the Fed offers banks.  It has support of more than 1,000 professors. Others want an abolition of all student loan debt.



One of the greatest enemies today is ALEC. This group is called the American Legislative Exchange Council. It is the reactionary group that has corporate backing. It tries to pass laws by recruiting members of the local government. ALEC helped to craft the evil Stand Your Grand law. This law is the basis a lot of human beings dying under controversial circumstances. The reactionaries tried to originally use Stand Your Ground as a justification for the evil murder of the unarmed 17 year old Trayvon Martin by the murderer (and assaulter of a woman) George Zimmerman. The President of the National Urban League named Marc Morial focused his attention to oppose ALEC. He wants that ALEC's corporate partners denounce the group. The good news is that some of its major supporters are withdrawing from the group.  Morial said the following: "...There needs to be sunlight on what they’re doing, which what they’re doing is creating model legislation and spread the poison of stand your ground all over the nation. Those who support ALEC should withdraw from ALEC because this kind of thing and the use of stand your ground is why at the very instance the law enforcement there in Sanford, Florida, did not arrest George Zimmerman as they should have, at the very inception..." In the months after the killing of Trayvon Martin, over 46 groups like Wal Mart, Miller Coors, Best Buy, McDonalds, and Coca-Cola dropped their ALEC memberships. Stand Your Ground is not the only controversial law that ALEC has peddled to state legislators. The group has been responsible for bills that block workers from getting paid sick leave, efforts to stop whistleblowers trying to expose horrific agricultural practices, and other bills (mean to stop environmental regulation, etc.). They are financially tied to the Koch Brothers, who are billionaires who made their fortune in the oil industry. ALEC funded some of the toughest sentencing laws in America. These laws benefit the prison industrial complex not the common people in the world. ALEC worked to pass the Truth in Sentencing Act in 25 states by 1995. They worked to pass laws to grow the private for profit prisons. In These Times, they made an investigation to reveal that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona’s state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law. We have the U.S. Civil Rights Commission to approve the investigation of racial bias in Stand Your Ground laws (which ALEC and the NRA sponsored). A 2012 study found that defendants invoking the defense that they were “standing their ground” are significantly more likely to prevail if the victim was black. Other research has found that states with Stand Your Ground laws have more homicides, and that the laws do not deter crime at all. So, the struggle continues. We should fight for a real quality of life.



Malcolm X was a strong revolutionary and he was more revolutionary than what even the late Manning Marable depicted him as. In the light of the verdict of the case, I will not castigate the Brother Manning Marable in a harsh way. I will mention that the late Brother Marable was in error. Now, we know that Malcolm X was one of the bravest and courageous political voices in the second half of the 20th century. He was not even 40 years old when he was assassinated in Harlem's Audubon Ballroom in 1965. He was very admired, feared, and respected. He was a living representative of living black manhood. Many of the establishment black leaders back then wanted to bow before Democratic politicians like John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to grant blacks human rights. Yet, Malcolm X easily and publicly said that the Democratic Party was racist to the core. Malcolm X accurately said that we should never bow before economically exploitative enemies. The reality was that Malcolm X was not some token Democratic activist. Malcolm X befriended socialist activists and held interviews with them. Still, Malcolm X was a strong, black revolutionary Nationalist. He always maintained his militancy after his Hajj in 1964. He wanted more direct action in solving political problems, because he felt that the leadership of the NOI did not go far enough in fighting for political justice in society. Malcolm X believed that the Nation of Islam was too politically aloof in dealing with conditions of society. In other words, Malcolm X fought against the hypocrisy of the bourgeois political discourse and exposed racism and oppression at the heart of modern society. The big picture is that the American capitalist system has been a key instrument causing black oppression. Strongly influenced by the struggles in colonial and neocolonial countries for emancipation from imperialist subjugation, Malcolm viewed the American black struggle as one of the liberation of an oppressed nation inside an imperialist metropolis. In one of his most influential speeches, “Message to the Grass Roots” (November 1963), he espoused “revolution” and defined it in these terms: “Revolution…is based on land. A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation.” For Malcolm, nationalism was the key dividing line between his ideology and that of the liberal leaders marching for integration: “These Negroes aren’t asking for any nation—they’re trying to crawl back on the plantation.” Malcolm X criticized capitalism. It is highly immoral for a select few to control the majority of the means of production of any society. Some sincere black nationalists believe in a black version of capitalism as a means to have liberation when the exploitation of any worker is immoral regardless of race. Malcolm X always rejected Jim Crow segregation since that evil system caused disenfranchisement among black human beings in human liberties and economic rights. The FBI and the New York police instigated provocations, jealousies, and distrust among the NOI and Malcolm X (or using the divide and conquer strategy as means to divide brothers and sisters against each other. Many of the brothers and the Sisters in the NOI and the OAAU were sincere and legitimately wanted freedom). The FBI and NYPD have a lot to answer for. The civil rights movement occurred heavily in the Cold War. When folks like the Deacons for Defense and Robert F. Williams undertook armed self-defense against the enemy, the Northern bourgeoisie allowed the South to adopt concessions in the nation. These concessions or partial gains for black human beings in the South include access to public facilities, voting rights and a degree of school integration. These actions never totally end the rule of oligarchy. The oligarchy still continued their policies of poverty, unemployment, racist cop brutality, bad housing, bad schools, etc. When activists tried to do something about this, many of our leaders were shunned, harmed, and even murdered via assassination. We should continue to fight white supremacy, injustice, and hypocrisy. Malcolm X in 1965 accurately said that if American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell harmed black civil rights activists in the South that he would exact ultimate physical retaliation against them (in a speech he gave to a rally in Harlem in January 24, 1965). He disagreed with imperialism and identified with the colonial revolutions that came after World War II. Malcolm X wanted human beings to vote, but he wanted us to register as Independents and handle the issues of our community. If you do not vote, you have the right to complain still since you have the right of free speech. You don't have to love this system, but we have the responsibility to fight for changes in the world though. Apathy is out of the picture. Action is in the picture. We can never be free by working within a system corrupt at its core. We should end the evil system and create a just system to have liberation.



The bigotry of the GOP is every known in the world. Even establishment conservative columnist David Brooks supports the immigration reform bill (that many Tea Party members hate). Some believe that the Senate approved bill would boost the economy and cut the deficit. There are some strengths and weaknesses in the bill. Reactionaries hate the government and any government legislation that can help minorities and the poor. They hate public health care reform, good stamps, and even immigration reform. Some hate these programs because of ideological disagreements and other reactionaries just hate these items because they are bigots. The reactionaries centuries ago and now hate the federal government to do anything radical to help the poor, minorities, etc. as a means to maintain white supremacy. The slaveholders Patrick Henry and George Mason fought the ratification of the Constitution since they perceived that the document’s concentration of power in the federal government – stripping the states of their “independence” and “sovereignty” as specified in the Articles of Confederation – would eventually doom slavery. Slavery is wicked and the South back then used it to fund their major industries. The Southern aristocrats had a vested interest in maintaining slavery in the South. The Anti-Federalists lost their fight against ratification of the Constitution, so they used Thomas Jefferson (a slaveholder) to redefine the Constitution away from its clear intent and to insert new theories about states’ rights, including the unconstitutional concept of state “nullification” of federal law. That is why Jefferson's Democratic Republican Party put Virginian defenders of slavery in the White House from 1801 to 1825 (or 25 consecutive years). The Federalists faded from the scene. They or the reactionaries hated Abraham Lincoln for his moderate action of federal government action to build railroads and fighting for the Union during the Civil War. The Southern reactionaries hated when the federal government came down south to restructure Southern society to give freed blacks education, an economic stake in the society and civil rights. After Union troops withdrew from the South in 1877, racist Southern whites ended Reconstruction and continued Jim Crow segregation. Reactionaries want their way of life back and when they say it, they mean it (this wicked way of life represents feudalism and no federal help to assist the poor). The Southern reactionaries opposed the federal government intervention in the Civil Rights movement. Later, the racist Southern strategy and Reagan's race bailing in Philadelphia, Mississippi continued the agenda of white supremacy (under the guise of states’ rights and libertarianism). Today, some in the GOP hypocritically claim to favor capitalism, but reject the potentially greater economic growth that can come as a result of immigration reform. We see the GOP using gerrymandering congressional tactics, ID laws violating minority rights, and other reactionary propaganda in the word. Affirmative action are not curse words regardless of what Rush Limbaugh says.

By Timothy