Since there has been an attack on the black community by O'Reilly and others, it is time to show the truth again. The agenda of the reactionaries is to make the traditional nuclear family God basically (in creating a theocratic culture) instead of it being one great type of family out of many families that can help society. A nuclear family is not the only type of family that can help a child. Blended families are legitimate. Now, we know that there is no such thing as a self-replicating culture of poverty. More than 40 years of the white backlash and recent reactionary words from even some black Americans have caused many to ignore the real system of oppression in the world. The common mantra of blaming the victim is common from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Bill O'Reilly. Moynihan made the lie that it is black culture not socioeconomic oppression that is causing the ills of the ghetto. The reactionaries hate us since we want racial and economic inequalities addressed as a means to solve this problem. The attacks on affirmative action, voting rights, and the poor have been efforts done by local racists and by the Supreme Court packed with Republican appointees. America has done slavery, Jim Crow, the War on Drugs, discrimination, and uses a judicial system that is racist against human beings. To ignore that is folly. Moynihan made many distortions in his 1965 report called "The Negro Family." He blamed black culture (including the scapegoating of black single mothers, which is an indirect shot at all black women in general) not racial oppression or economic oppression for many issues in the black community. This report has been used as a means to try to derail the pursuit of equality. Racial barriers ought to be attacked. From that time on, any non-nuclear family has been bashed as illegitimate, inferior, and weak (in the realm of an extreme patriarchal culture). We know that many single mothers use a big, legitimate network of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, neighbors, and friends to help raise children. Many suburban nuclear families are not all perfect either. Culture matters and we need to have a strong culture. Yet, culture is never an independent self-sustaining factor in the production and reproduction of poverty. We need to have a real economy where the poor can have jobs that pay a living wage. Many scholars have challenged the notion of culture as an independent, causal factor in generating poverty, and none more effectively than Elliot Liebow in his 1967 study, Tally’s Corner. Occupational apartheid is a real danger in our world today. We must end poverty itself not blaming the victims of it for everything under the sun. The lie that the enemy advances is that the poor are victims of their own vices, thus shifting attention away from powerful political and economic institutions that could make a difference in their lives. If those institutions were absolved of responsibility, the poor would be left on their own. Many times, poverty can cause pathological behavior not that this behavior being the essence of an ethnic group or race. Some of the youth are encircled by structural barriers and consequently resort to these cultural defenses, as Douglas Glasgow argued in his neglected 1981 book, The Black Underclass. Liebow had it right when he stripped away surface appearances and put culture in its proper social and existential context. That is why white suburban youth can have saggy pants, listen to hip hop, and are far more prone to drug use than those living in the ghetto. The reactionaries try to place all single mothers into a single box. While they are at it, they want to eliminate measures that can actually improve family lives like child care funding, paid maternity leave. We need gender equality. That means that we should continue to fight for equal pay for equal work. There has never been a monolithic nuclear family all of the time in human history. Only 9 percent of people in America today live in a nuclear family of 2 married parents with a wage earning father and a full time mother. Families are diverse. All loving, enriching, and real families ought to be respected in the world. In modern capitalism, it claims to endorse the family, but its high work hours, destruction of leisure time, and lax wages harms families in fact. It is the bankruptcy of the system that contributes too many problems in the family. So, we should eliminate poverty and joblessness as a means to solve the problems of our communities. We must have structural changes like real affirmative action, real jobs, real education, and real health. The ghetto is a location and not a state of mind. In other words, the vast majority of those who live in the ghetto are not murderers, rapists, extreme degenerates, or drug abusers at all. We must fight institutionalized racism. We must restore the social safety net. We should end mandatory sentencing, enforce anti-discrimination laws, and have radical political changes in our communities. We must eliminate racial and economic inequalities in our world.
It has been 50 years after the March on Washington. There have been huge changes in America. The struggle continues. We know that mainstream American society lives in delusion. We know that we still have the huge issue of oppression. Many reactionary whites live in fantasy land. Only one third of whites in the USA believe that the killing of Trayvon Martin was unjustified. Now, a poll says that a majority of white preposterously believe now that whites have replaces blacks as the primary of victims of racial discrimination in contemporary America. They are so deluded. That is a lie. We know that 28 percent of African Americans and 37 percent of black children are officially poor as compared to 10 percent of white and 13 percent of white children. 13 percent of blacks are officially unemployed as compared to 7 percent of whites. This silliness is brought about by a wicked, white supremacy cartel-capitalist system. Now, we have known that blacks have suffered a far bigger fall in income since 2007 than any other racial group in America. There is a clear racist criminal justice system as found by a Tuft's Harvard survey two years ago. When you have even some libertarians saying this or admitting that the justice system is evil including racist, you know that we have an issue here in America. There is still a huge income gap among ethnic groups in America. Black Americans make up 40 percent of the nation's global unmatched prison population of about 2.3 million human beings. Black Americans make up 11 percent of all human beings behind bars in the world. Now, the silly notion by the majority of whites in America in viewing themselves as discriminated more against than blacks are refuted by many means. Perhaps nobody has done more to demonstrate the persistence of anti-black racial prejudice than Princeton sociologist Devah Pager. As she explains on her faculty Web site, she “investigate[s] discrimination in low wage labor markets by hiring young men – who differ only by race, ethnicity, or criminal background – to pose as job applicants, presenting identical qualifications to employers for real entry level jobs.” Her work “shows substantial evidence of hiring discrimination, with black men receiving call-backs or job offers at only half the rate of equally qualified whites. In fact, a young black man with a clean record does no better in his search for low wage work than a white man with a felony conviction.” She found out that blacks without records will do as well as whites with criminal records. This has been found in different experiments nationwide in U.S. cities. Now, we know that we are still fighting for human rights. When a thuggish and armed half white faux police captain viciously stalks and murders an unarmed black teenager, then we should continue to fight for justice. The reactionary, proto fascist FOX New network stroke white racial fears all of the time. Some of the Tea Party ilk even considers President Barack Obama (who is neoliberal centrist man) as a Marxist Black Nationalist. That is hilarious. The two party system has been funded by corporate interests like Goldman Sachs. In the final analysis, we have to both address racial oppression and class oppression. In this era, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Right Act and the Florida court acquitted George Zimmerman. So, we are fighting for jobs and freedom just like our forebears did during the 1963 March on Washington where over 250,000 human beings came to D.C. as a means to seek justice for all humanity. We have the right to advance economic justice and equality. Social change is not easy. It is not straight or paved with gold at all. Big business still exploits workers. Now, the demands of the 1963 march were not just about desegregation of all school districts and ending Jim Crow totally. It was about a massive federal program to train and place unemployed works with dignified jobs at decent wages. It also wanted a national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living. So, racial equality and economic justice are linked in a real agenda for change. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 came about as a result of the efforts of activists. Now, we see our current economic crisis. Today’s minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is unbelievably far from 1963′s demand for a living wage, which would be over $13 in today’s dollars. Opportunities for education and housing remain in fact, though not law, segregated and unequal. We want things done by taxing the super-rich. There are cuts to the social safety net (like cuts against Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security), banker bailouts, quantitative easing, etc. done by both major parties is real. That is why we are fighting for a federal program for guaranteeing good paying jobs for all. There should be an improvement and expansion of the social safety net. There should be justice for Trayvon Martin and all victims of extrajudicial murders. The Voting Rights Act should be restored without voter suppression. Imperialism needs to end and human needs are superior to money greed. Workers and the poor are under attack via wage cuts, health care cuts, attacks on pensions, and high rates of unemployment. We should fight for a better world. Health care is still a human right and schools should be funded as well. The super-rich should not have record tax breaks, but people should have real liberty in the world.
There has been the NSA controversy coming on in the world. There is another revelation of the cluster of unconstitutional surveillance programs run by the NSA and other agencies of the U.S. government. The NY Times said that the vast quantities of emails sent and received by Americans communicating with people abroad are swept up, cloned, and combed through by NSA analysts. This was one on the basis that the messages contain certain words or phrases deemed suspicious by the government. The Times reported that international data sweeps target apparently most of the email traffic flowing to and from the U.S. The newspaper writes: “The NSA is temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what are apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border... While it has long been known that the agency conducts extensive computer searches of data it vacuums up overseas, that it is systematically searching—without warrants—through the contents of Americans’ communications that cross the border reveals more about the scale of its secret operations.” The cited congressional testimony last June was said by NSA Deputy Director John Inglis. Inglis replied to a lawmaker who asked if the agency listened to phone call or read the emails of American citizens. He said that, “We do not target the content of US person communications without a specific warrant anywhere on the earth.” These words were carefully chosen to conceal a lie. NSA analysts supposedly do no target Americans. They just regularly and systematically seize their emails and examine their contents without a warrant. If they happen to contain one of an unknown number of target words, under the email and text message vacuuming procedure, an individual need not be in contact with someone targeted for surveillance to have his communications read. It is sufficient to mention the name of the targeted group, or any other word potentially associated with that group. According to the Times, no Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court ruling regarding such “about the target” searches of electronic communications has been disclosed to the public. The Times article, which, given the number of unnamed senior intelligence officials it cites, has all the earmarks of a damage control piece written in collaboration with the NSA, nevertheless it reveals factual information that demolishes claims by Obama and other US officials that the there are no mass surveillance operations targeting the American people. These words are similar to the views of NSA contractor turned whistle blower Edward Snowden. Swonden said that NSA analysts are eavesdropping on private voice and written communications of millions of Americans (including millions more people internationally). The article was published just one day after Obama declared on the nationally televised “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” that “there is no spying on Americans” and that “we don’t have a domestic surveillance program.” We know that the government is capturing phone calls, emails, and texts from every American. Glenn Greenwald reported in the Guardian in early June that the NSA collected 97 billion pieces of intelligence all around the world in March of 2013 (via the program called Boundless Informant including 3 billion from the U.S.). Judge Andrew Napolitano said the following about the NSA, “the government has the ability to access from storage the actual emails and texts that every American has sent in the past two-and-a-half years and the sound of telephone calls, the voices on the calls, that Americans have made in the past two-and-a-half years.” As Napolitano observed, Judge Roger Vinson signed a court order on April 25, 2013 directing the telecom giant Verizon to surrender telephone information on 113 million customers between the dates of April 25 and July 19.
The Center for Constitutional Rights released a statement at the time of Vinson’s ruling, saying, “This order from the FISA court is the broadest surveillance order to ever have been issued: it requires no level of suspicion and applies to all Verizon subscribers anywhere in the US.” The government for years has lied about the police state spying operations as being rampant and systematic. When asked during a Senate hearing earlier this year, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans,” Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, committed the crime of perjuring himself before Congress. “No, sir,” he replied. Former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden recently wanted surveillance programs and he denounced anti-surveillance activists. The Bush administration's mass surveillance program of STELLARWIND instituted warrantless mass data collection. “If and when our government grabs Edward Snowden, and brings him back here to the United States for trial, what does this group do?” asked Hayden, referring to Snowden supporters as “nihilists, anarchists, activists, LulzSec, Anonymous, twenty-somethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years.” Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union said that “dragnet surveillance will be poisonous to the freedoms of inquiry and association” and described the massive scale of the programs: “The NSA has cast a massive dragnet over Americans’ international communications, collecting and monitoring virtually all of them, and retaining some untold number of them in government databases. This is precisely the kind of generalized spying that the Fourth Amendment was intended to prohibit.” So, we should oppose this evil surveillance program by the NSA. The NSA is slick in its terminology, but the truth is that human civil liberties are more important to have than tyranny.
California Senator Dianne Feinstein has proposed an amendment to the Media Shield Law. This is an irrelevant law that ignores the protection already afforded by the First Amendment. It would limit the law's protection only to “real reporters,” not bloggers and other upstart alternative media types. The reality is that bloggers and other alternative sites possess greatly journalists. In many cases, bloggers and other have great information than the mainstream corporate dominated media. Feinstein voiced her concern “that the current version of the bill would grant a special privilege to people who aren’t really reporters at all, who have no professional qualifications,” like bloggers and citizen journalists. Last week, Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, worried the Shield Law, if passed, would be used to protect whistleblowers and others who ferret out government corruption. “The world has changed. We’re very careful in this bill to distinguish journalists from those who shouldn’t be protected, WikiLeaks and all those, and we’ve ensured that,” Schumer said. “But there are people who write and do real journalism, in different ways than we’re used to. They should not be excluded from this bill.” The bill moving through Congress would require the Justice Department to notify reporters it decides to monitor. The law would allow Justice Department officials to delay notice for a period of 45 days. In addition, it would permit the DOJ to ask for an extension of 45 days. In May, it was learned that the Justice Department had illegally seized the phone records of Associated Press journalists over a two month period. Obama's Justice Department did not provide notice or a court issued warrant prior to violating the confidentially of the journalists. In response to criticism of the illegal surveillance of journalists, Justice Department boss Eric Holder presented rule changes to the White House in July. The changes will require that journalists involved in “ordinary news-gathering activities” cannot be served with a warrant connected to their own investigative work unless the journalist in question is the subject of a criminal investigation. Also, we know that the NSA, DEA, and local cops have shared information concealed from judges and defendants, but there is no mainstream liberal outrage over this issue. So, we know that not only the Republicans are wrong on some issues, but some liberal Democrats are wrong to protect and love NSA surveillance in a controversial fashion. The failed, hypocritical war of terror is linked to the racist, hypocritical, and failed war on drugs. They all advance fear and waste billions of dollars at the expense of human dignity and human liberty. A Monday morning Reuters news story confirms that the NSA shares unknown quantities of its vacuum cleaner surveillance of every American's electronic communications and whereabouts with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which duly passes it on to thousands of state and local police agencies in every jurisdiction. This refutes the notion that the NSA is doing everything by the book. This information pipeline between the NSA, the DEA, the local police departments, and other contractors is not overseen by legislators sworn to secrecy or clandestine courts. In the Bush years and now, we witness violations of due process, mass incarceration, surveillance of the digital lives, and other injustices in the world. Many liberals are wrong to support universal surveillance and sharing of that surveillance data with local cops who conceal its origin (and claim that everything that they do is legal).
One of the most important events of black history was the 1972 Gary, Indiana Declaration. It outlined the strength of black intellectual power. It made the views that radical, fundamental changes must happen in order for black human beings to have liberation. It wanted to advance independent black politics. The Gary conference had nearly 8,000 African American activists, professional politicians, businessmen, and revolutionaries. They wanted to discuss the future of Black politics. It was important in the sense it showed the diversity of the black liberation movement. There were cultural nationalists like Amiri Baraka. There were members of the Democratic Party like Jesse Jackson and members of the NAACP. There were folks like Richard Hatcher (the Democratic mayor of Gary named Richard Hatcher) and again Amiri Baraka that wanted a break with both the Democratic and Republican parties. The differences in the convention were not completely resolved, but a positive of the convention was that it allowed black human beings to express their diverse concerns (and aspirations). Today, we live in a new era with many of the same challenges of yesteryear. Tons of black human beings now are fighting for truth and are fighting for justice for all humankind. Other folks later rejected the militancy of the debates of the Gary Conference and they desire reform or just concessions (not revolutionary solutions). Many of the black middle class and the rich forget that the poor must be liberated. This liberation is not found in the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party, but in independent, direct action. So, some of the black middle class sought to remove the barriers of social mobility to advance in the system without seeking to transform or destroy the system (as a means to replace it with a better system that can benefit all of the people). The growing of the conservatism in some of the black middle class (in another level) came during the 1970s and 1980s. During that time, many political figures advanced austerity and corporate growth without the revolutionary transformation of society. Some even co-signed the brutal racist police terror harming communities of color in NYC and throughout the nation. The betrayal of the black community by the system of white supremacy has been found by the bombing of a street in a Black Philadelphia neighborhood that housed the revolutionary MOVE organization and the War on Drugs. Even the leadership of some in the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus receive dollars from corporate interests from BP Amoco, Chevron, Anheuser Busch, and others. There are many in both organizations that are sincere and are fighting for real change though, so I want to make that clear. We should have grassroots movements now continuously. We should advance the interests of black workers irrespective of the demands from the GOP or the Democrats. Although all Blacks gained from the triumphs of 1960s and 1970s, the disproportionate beneficiaries have been a section of the Black middle class, who have become well-integrated into the economic and political system and its principle institutions, especially the Democratic Party. We know what works. The most gains for us as a people came as a result of mass struggle that affected society as a whole. Organization, sacrifice, mobilization, and mass struggle are key ingredients in having profound social change in the world.
By Timothy
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