Weekend News

The U.S. budget deal is here. Yet, it will delay the issue for months from now. The agreement among Democrats and Republicans shows the certain features of the political system in America. The result of the agreement is the continuation of sequester budget cuts. These cuts impose billions of dollars in across the board spending reductions. These cuts deal with education, home heating assistance, legal aid, and other social programs. They will continue to be extended into the New Year. The implementation of the White House's Affordable Care Act will continue to be largely unaffected. This deals with the future of employer provided health care for millions of workers. The political establishment, in this agreement of a budget deal, is a framework within the two parties can deal with something. It will deal with its the creating of sweeping cuts in social spending (and reductions in corporate taxes). The agreement mandates the creation of a conference that wants to make a bipartisan budget agreement by mid-December. That will reduce the deficit and national debt via the slashing of many social programs like Medicare and Social Security. In his press conference Thursday morning, President Barack Obama made clear that the focus of the Democrats and Republicans will now turn to these programs. “In the coming days and weeks,” he said, “we should sit down and pursue a balanced approach to a responsible budget, a budget that grows our economy faster and shrinks our long-term deficits further.” Obama added, “The challenges we have right now are not short-term deficits; it’s the long-term obligations that we have around things like Medicare and Social Security.” As a result of the massive cuts already implemented, he said, short-term deficits have already fallen significantly. These cuts are shown as moderate and popular, but they are harsh and cruel. The Republicans lost many of their goals. Yet, the reactionary Republicans set the framework in such manufactured crisis and the Democrats agree with most of their demands, which some agree in any case. The ACA has strengths, but the corporate elite helped to form the law in the first place. It can increase the risk of privatization schemes for Medicare and some questions its effect on workers' health care benefits. We have historic economic inequality, record corporate profits, collapsing wages, and attacks on the workers, but some are ignoring this reality. Many even in the Democratic Party are not talking about these issues. Even quantitative easing has helped big corporations, big investors, and Main Street not Wall Street. Even the NT and OT are right to teach that fraud, manipulation, or oppression against the poor is wrong no matter how high and mighty the wrong doer is. So, prosecuting Wall Street criminals or any corporate criminal is the right thing to do. That is why it was unpunished fraud that caused the Great Depression and the modern Great Recession. When you punish financial crimes that is a major determinant of a nation's prosperity. The interests of the people take precedent above the status quo. Since the 2008 Wall Street collapse, we know the weaknesses of capitalism. The ruling class wants to preserve its system and we must execute policies to serve social need not the oligarchy. We should reject the agenda of the financial aristocracy and desire freedom for all.



It is hypocrisy among the establishment like usual. They allow billions of dollars of money to be sent into Wall Street. They allow the Federal Reserve to fund bank bailouts. They also allow many legacy clauses, subsidies, tax allowances, and other special privileges for the super-rich (which are special rights for the few not equal rights), but many of them hate it that universities use means to advance diversity in the classroom. I mean diversity beyond just race, but diverse in other areas too like musical talents, athletic talents, economic levels (since there are extremely smart, qualified poor human beings as well that have the skills to go into college, but not the resources), etc. We do not live in a total fair society. Actions to fight discrimination and economic oppression are warranted. Therefore, radical changes are needed as a means to make society fairer. These reactionaries would be more consistent if they advocated the banning of all legacies and other privileges, but they do not. They just hate any discussion or execution of racial justice in society. Modern affirmative action is not even an explicit quota system. The goal of true affirmative action is to use race as one factor out of many to get qualified black males and black females (including other minorities) into college. The college still has discretion in allowing students into their colleges or not via a fair fashion under flexible affirmative action. So, folks have the right to advocate for diversity in colleges and to stand for their own interests. The same ones talking about stepping up will not tell imperialists to step down from nefarious, demented war crimes against innocent men, women, and children. They will not tell crooked police to step down from murder of unarmed Brothers and Sisters. They will not tell corporate executives to step down from austerity. They will not tell evil Tea Party folks to step down from perverted rhetoric. Yes, I will go there because it ought to be like that. So, I will step up against white supremacy and I will step up into moral development and continued advocacy of justice. JUSTICE is real stepping up. Likewise, we should advance education. We should support education that is rooted in black African centered themes as a means to assist our black people greatly. Nothing is wrong with that. We are Africans at the end of the day as the great late Kwame Ture have said. The shutdown exposed the extremism of some in the GOP. These radicals of some in the GOP are wrong to advance radical austerity since they obviously could care less about the complexities of poverty or the real interests of the poor at all. This debate will come again months from now since this deal will delay extra discussions about issues. Obviously, this deal is a compromise and Wall Street loves it since it maintains the status quo. This deal does not address the core reasons for our economic crisis. This is a short term resolution. The GOP miscalculated when some of them tried to use the ACA as a bargaining chip in budget/debt ceiling negotiations. The truth is that we have to allow the government not to be shut down and using the ACA as a hostage chip is a wrong way to try to end the government shutdown. The GOP's popularity is very low now. Yet, the deal is better than what the Tea Party desired, which would be draconian cuts to the social safety net that folks fought, worked, and sometimes died for.

It is obvious that a single payer system is better than the Affordable Care Act. More and more Americans want a single payer health care system. The ACA is a mixed bag system. The law exempts many large corporations from ensuring their employees. Many loopholes are in the law that grant under the table exemptions to some corporations. There are some regulatory loopholes which let them to raise co-pays and deductibles to levels that will compel many of their low-paid workers to take their chances on the federal and state exchanges. We know that a single payer single system would free U.S. businesses totally from providing health insurance for their employees and left no one without health insurance. There is Medicare expansion in some states, but some Republican controlled state governments wants to deny Medicaid benefits to millions. The ACA is embracing of the marketplace being confusing in interesting. Some low cost quality insurance in that marketplace will have low insurance premiums. That means that the greatest care will have high premiums. A single payer system will have everyone insured from birth to the grave. The ACA website had issues. The ACA forces human beings to have health insurance from the same private insurance companies exploiting human life.  Health insurance executives got massive salary increases since the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Existing insurance company shareholders saw profits and stock prices spike, first with the passage of the ACA, then with the onset of open enrollment. Anticipated ballooning profits have led health insurance companies to buy back as much of their own stock as possible. What else would you expect? Health insurance company lobbyists wrote the ACA. ACA only covers health of the nation's total uninsured. It leaves two thirds of the black Americans and single mothers along with half the low wage employees currently without health insurance untouched. The Republicans and the Democrats watered down the ACA so much that it is a piecemeal private insurance reform law instead of public health care reform. The person who drafted the Obamacare legislation was Elizabeth Fowler. She was Senator Max Baucus’s chief health policy counsel and had joined his staff after having been a VP at WellPoint, the US’s largest health insurance provider. And when she left her government job she went back to the health care industry at the pharmaceutical giant, Johnson & Johnson. The ACA is still a Heritage Foundation plan beyond Fowler's actions. The ACA was made complex. The ACA was created as a means to enrich insurance and drug companies in a more slick fashion. Health care is a human right. It is not medically private commodities at all. The Heritage Foundation influenced the ACA. Romneycare is similar to the ACA. So, the ACA have many reactionary elements to it. The new health system is complex by design because that inhibits transparency and accountability. Imagine what we would be seeing right now if instead of the ACA, we had passed HR 676, also known as Expanded and Improved Medicare for All. This would have created a single publicly funded non-profit universal and comprehensive national health insurance. Overnight, everyone living in the US would be eligible for care without financial barriers. Any person who showed up to a health facility for care would be admitted because they would be automatically enrolled. Every person would have the right to receive the care they need rather than the care they can afford.

 

 

There are many historical facts of the JFK assassination. John Connally was shoot during the assassination. Connally was ironically appointed by Nixon as his Secretary of the Treasury. Connally did not serve under Nixon until some 8 years after the assassination. Southern Democrats have long been much more conservative counterparts back then. Connally's innate conservativism was known in many Democratic circles. His Democratic Party rival, Senator Ralph Yarbrough, was considered one of the last great progressive Southern Democrats, and a fervent supporter of Kennedy. He disliked both Connally and Johnson. (Randall Bennett Woods: LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, pgs. 415-416). In 1969, Connally resigned as Governor and became a lawyer for a Texas firm. He was then appointed Secretary of the Treasury by Nixon in 1971. He then resigned that post by joining the Democrats for Nixon campaign of 1972. By 1973 he had become a full-fledged Republican candidate (Douglas Harlan, Texas Monthly, January 1982 pgs. 114-119).  Connally opposed a parade route. The parade route was specifically organized by Secret Service men Winston Lawson and Forrest Sorrels, who overrode the Dallas authorities they were supposed to plan it with. Connally loudly voiced security concerns about the final venue's size, referring to the Trade Mart's balcony and 53 entrances. He was also uninformed of the actual parade route. Even the Warren Commission was not perfect. It was created by men and scholars have outlined its weakness (even scholars who follow the narrative that Oswald did it alone).  It said that Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed Kennedy by himself; that Jack Ruby then marched down the Main Street ramp of the Dallas Police station and killed Oswald alone and unaided; and that neither man knew each other or was part  of a larger conspiracy. There has been 4 million pages declassified since 1964 and we should research them to get the fuller truth on this issue. Since 1964, there have been other major official inquiries that have shown that the Warren Commission was not just a flawed inquiry, but that it was deprived of crucial information
There were Congressional inquiries about this issue like the 1975 Church Committee review by Senators Richard Schweiker and Gary Hart into the failure of the FBI and CIA to fully inform the Warren Commission of relevant facts. Then, there was the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which was in session from 1976-79 and concluded that there likely was a second gunman in Kennedy’s murder. Both Garrison and the HSCA interviewed several witnesses who stated that they saw Oswald at Banister’s. Some of these witnesses said that Banister actually gave Oswald an office. The declassified files of the ARRB that the CIA had decided to run a counter-intelligence program against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in 1961. This included electronic surveillance, interception of mail, and, most importantly in regards to Oswald, the planting of double agents inside that organization. This CIA program was supervised by James McCord (who later surfaced as one of the Watergate burglars) and David Phillips, who was reportedly seen in New Orleans at Banister’s office and at the Southland Center in Dallas with Oswald. (Larry Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, pgs. 168, 183) Therefore, from these links, it is possible Oswald got the outdated Corliss Lamont pamphlet through Phillips via Banister. This information is not found in the Warren Commission at all. But the HSCA discovered a new witness, one who appears to have been avoided by the Warren Commission. Sgt. Don Flusche told the new inquiry that there was no doubt in his mind that Ruby, whom he had known for years, did not walk down Main Street anywhere near the ramp because he was standing against his car at the time, which was parked across the street. So, the Warren Commission should not be the final words on the assassination since human beings have every right to make further investigations and further inquiries into the JFK assassination, which was evil and unjustified. We owe to the late President John F. Kennedy and so many others to find the truth about these important issues.
 

 

 

Steve Biko is always a hero of black human beings. He gave up his life in a courageous fashion as a means for the human race to be free and liberated from oppression. He was in the Black Consciousness movement and was a leader of it. We must reject the neoliberal agenda that is still strong in some sectors of South Africa. Wealth redistribution and land ownership by Africans remains incomplete to a certain extent. Steve Biko wanted power and freedom for black human beings. He was a great freedom fighter. South Africa now in fact is having a resurgence of the Black Consciousness (BC) movement. The black majority in South Africa should have complete, revolutionary freedom in their homeland. Addressing this interplay in his essay “Our Strategy For Liberation,” Biko makes the point that “...I think there is no running away from the fact that in South Africa there is such an ill distribution of wealth that any form of political freedom which does not touch on the proper distribution of wealth will be meaningless. The whites have locked up within a small minority of themselves the greater proportion of the country’s wealth. If we have a mere change of face of those in governing positions what is likely to happen is that black people will continue to be poor, and you will see a few blacks filtering through into the so-called bourgeoisie. Our society will be run as of yesterday. So for meaningful change to appear there needs to be an attempt at reorganizing the whole economic pattern and policies within this particular country.” This interplay deals with freedom and power. He wanted black liberation. In his essay on “The Definition of Black Consciousness” he makes the point that “…Blacks no longer seek to reform the system because so doing implies acceptance of the major points around which the system revolves. Blacks are out to completely transform the system and to make of it what they wish. Such a major undertaking can only be realized in an atmosphere where people are convinced of the truth inherent in their stand. Liberation therefore is of paramount importance in the concept of Black Consciousness, for we cannot be conscious of ourselves and yet remain in bondage. We want to attain the envisioned self which is a free self.” So, we need to be free and that relates to the proper distribution of wealth. Without that, you can't have true liberation at all. The only way that liberation can come is when the oppressed control all functions of economic and political power as a means to transform society. We need economic justice. There are many legitimate grassroots rebellions by the black communities, the working class, peasants, and students. The evil neoliberal agenda in South Africa is shown by the cold blooded murders of Andries Tatane and black workers in Marikana. The 2 uprisings were about workers wanted freedom. Steve Biko wanted solutions. This also explains why, at the time of his capture and ultimate murder, he was on a mission to plant the seeds for closer cooperation between the BCM, ANC, PAC and Unity Movement. Steve Biko was a pan-Africanist and an internationalist in his outlook. Africans have every right to have self-determination. So, we should continue to fight for unity among our people globally. In that united front, we can fight for more solutions in the black community.

By Timothy