There have been concessions in
the latest budget deal that will harm workers, especially poor workers. Tea
Party leader Paul Ryan celebrated the announcement of the deal. Senator Patty
Murray (who is a Democrat) loves the deal as well. Both are chairs of the
Budget Committees in the House and Senate. The deal with hit federal workers'
paychecks and it will threaten vital social services among the most vulnerable
in society. Some in the media and the rabid reactionaries said that the GOP
caved in negotiation merely because the House Republicans were describing
anything as a compromise. Yet, the working people lose in the deal. The deal
will not extend supplementary unemployment insurance for the long term jobless
and avoids new taxes on the wealthy. The New York Times reported on the
concession in these terms: "...The agreement, which would finance the
government through September 30, 2015, would eliminate about $63 billion in
across-the-board domestic and military cuts. But it would provide $23 billion
in deficit reduction by extending a 2 percent cut to Medicare providers through
2023, two years beyond the cuts set by the Budget Control Act of 2011."
Many Democrats claim that they won in the budget deal still. Yet, there are
provisions like increased pension contributions from federal workers, worth at
least $6 billion. In other words, the ongoing attack on public sector workers'
pensions at the state level is being quietly written into the fine print of the
federal budget. Many Tea Party politicians and reactionary groups labeled the
deal a sellout by their once strong supporter Ryan. "Heritage Action, the
political arm of the Heritage Foundation and a group influential with
rank-and-file House Republicans, came out against the deal even before it was
announced, as did Americans for Prosperity, the advocacy group backed by the
billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch," the Times reported. Ryan and many Republicans
love the deal since it has no taxes on the wealthy, increases in military
spending, and continued austerity for the workers and the poor. As Times
Columnist Paul Krugman, the Democrats gave up a lot in the deal: "...Extended
benefits weren't renewed, so 1.3 million workers will be cut off at the end of
this month, and many more will see their benefits run out in the months that
follow. And if you take a longer perspective--if you look at what has happened
since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2010--what
you see is a triumph of anti-government ideology that has had enormously
destructive effects on American workers..." Rep. Mark Pocan was one of the
32 House Democrats who voted on the budget deal. He rightfully said that the
deal eliminates unemployment insurance for 1.3 million Americans and does nothing
to cause massive economic or job growth. The Democrats compromised more than
the Republicans. Even a majority of Americans believe in increasing taxes on
the wealthy as a means to grow the economy. Krugman wrote the truth that the
federal government has been getting smaller under President Barack Obama.
Government employment is down; government spending is down (including state and
local governments). This is record stuff never seen in American history since
the 1950's (during the demobilization after WWII). The bad thing is that the
cuts deal with education, infrastructure, research, and conservation. The deal
is loved by Wall Street Republicans. Republicans will demand more cuts in
February. Workers and the poor need justice not austerity.
The
oppression of black African people in Israel is real. Even America is more
progressive on immigration issues than many European nations and Israel. Israel
had roundup a lot of African immigrants. Racist Israeli ruling party member
Israelis have called black people in Israel a cancer in Israel. The government
packed them into a detention center in the desert (as a means for the
authorities to circumvent court rulings against imprisonment without trial).
They want to demoralize the black people as a means for them to go into Africa.
The Israel Knesset (ironically on United Nations Human Day in December 10)
passed a new law. The law with authorize the government to round any of the
55,000 African asylum seekers living in Israel and send them into a desert
detainment camp. After all nine Supreme Court justices unanimously struck
down the centerpiece of the government's anti-African legislation in September;
the amendment was rapidly replaced with another. The High Court ruled then that
to jail without trial people who have committed no crime except to seek asylum
is an unacceptable violation of their human rights. To circumvent the
ruling and keep the Africans behind bars, the government said it would allow
them furloughs lasting a couple of hours at a time, and thus the place in which
they would be held by force could no longer be properly called a jail. The new
law is even more barbaric than the old amendment. While the January 2012
legislation mandated three years of incarceration, the December 2013
legislation allows for indefinite detention. Most of the 55,000 non Jewish
African people moved into Israel as a means to escape political persecution
form their homelands. They wanted safety in a democratic society, but the
society they came into is hardly democratic on many issues. Ironically,
Israel's 1948 Declaration of Independence, Israel's founding fathers vowed
that it "will be open for Jewish immigration." In order to secure the
support of the United Nations, they added that, "it will ensure complete
equality of social and political right to all its inhabitants irrespective of
religion, race or sex." We see that to be a lie. The government wants to decrease
the amount of non-Jews in the country and they want more Jewish people to live
in Israel. Mostly Palestinians live in Israel who are non-Jewish residents of
Israel. The first major test of Israel's immigration policy came in 1969,
when a group of African Americans came to the country, abiding by the laws of
the Old Testament and craving to live in the Holy Land. When they wanted to
have their own spiritual tradition, the officials had the bodies of their
dead dug up from the Jewish cemetery and re-interned next to a trash heap at
the edge of town. Black people in Israel are heavily discriminated against and
oppressed in Israel. The same African asylum seekers would have refugee status
by the United States and the EU in over 80 percent cases. Asylum seekers tell stories
of forced labor and ethnic cleansing. Israel's Minister of Internal
Security has even acknowledged that official police statistics show that the
crime rate of African asylum-seekers is significantly lower than that of native
Israelis. Israeli vigilantes patrol Israeli city streets at night to attack any
dark skinned person they come across. You won't hear this in CNN, MSNBC, or
FOX. Yet, this is real. Apartheid policies in Israel against blacks and
Palestinians are immoral. It must be opposed completely.
The
action of austerity by the PTB in American society has been a crime against
humanity. There are growing number of billionaires in the ranks of the stock
market boom and Wall Street. The ruling class love greed spanning human
history. They want to use austerity as a means to control more economic power
in the world. The Great Recession was not created by the poor. It was created
in part by rampant financial speculation in the housing market and other
arenas. The big banks and big business say that we have a renaissance, but we
don't see it for the rest of humankind. Wages are stagnant. Corporations have record
profits. There is great hunger yet cuts to food stamps loom over the horizon.
Some folks have given up finding a job, which has contributed to the drop in
unemployment numbers. In the time since the financial crisis claimed 8.7
million jobs, only 7.4 million have been created, and these overwhelmingly pay
low wages. Half of all employees in America now earn less than $26,000 a year,
barely above the official poverty level for a family of four. Even the ACA has
encouraged employers to cut hours to avoid providing health care while jacking
up insurance cots for much of the workforce. One quarter of the entire U.S.
workforce depend on some form of public assistance. Workers in Walmart are paid
miserably. In New York City, food charities were already rationing portion
sizes and turning people away before Superstorm Sandy struck last year and
threw many more on their mercy. Affordable housing is a rarity in New York
City. Many women with young children are punching out of work only to sign into
homeless shelters. Cruelty is not just limited among the Republicans. Two
Democratic Party city councilmen in Los Angeles are plumbing the depths of
official abuse by proposing a ban on publicly feeding the homeless, a measure
already enacted or under consideration in over 30 cities, including
Philadelphia, Seattle and Orlando. Earlier this year, L.A. had sought legal
sanction for its police force to seize and destroy the scant personal
belongings of those on skid row. In many black-majority cities like Baltimore
and Detroit, where poverty and homelessness abound, authorities are demolishing
neighborhoods or letting them burn rather than invest in maintaining and
restoring housing stock. So, both parties have been weighed in the scales of justice and
found guilty. The devastation of Detroit is the testament to the evils found in
cartel capitalism. Authorities are cutting pensions, strip retirement benefits
form teachers, nurses, and other workers. Meanwhile, farm subsidies have padded
the accounts of a number of billionaires, among them Charles Schwab and David
Rockefeller Sr. Ken Cook, head of the watchdog Environmental Working Group,
noted in A Place at the Table (2013): “Taxpayers shelled out
more than a quarter of a trillion dollars for various federal farm subsidies
between 1995 and 2010. But to characterize this staggering sum as a big
government bailout or welfare would be manifestly unfair—to bailouts and
welfare.” He adds: “To be clear, the US Department of Agriculture has cracked
down on one nagging problem with absentee owners in recent years: the USDA
assures Congress that almost none of the subsidies paid to dead farmers are
improper.” The Tea Party reactionaries want to ax social programs since they
view any redistribution as evil. The working class is protesting by fighting
back.
This is a
new decade, a new century, and a new millennium. In discussion about genders,
we have to fair and accurately. It is very evident that some want to use
complementarianism as an excuse to promote some brutal form of reactionary patriarchy.
I believe in egalitarianism not complementarianism. Real balance is needed to
make families and societies work. A family with two equal partners works better
than a relationship with a boss and a subordinate. Oppressive hierarchies are
not democratic and they stifle real social progress among men and women. I
realize that relationship work on giftedness or both partners utilizing their
gifts in the best, effective fashion possible. Gender based absolutes are
impossible to device in a rigid fashion. In other words, some men hate sports
and some women love sports. There are a growing amount of even evangelical
theologians, scholars, professors, and pastors that are debunking a
complementarian interpretation of Scripture. Many of them made books like
Discovering Biblical Equality by Ronald Pierce, Rebecca Merrill Groothuis, and
Gordon Free, etc. True relationships deal with the appreciation of males and
females not the suppression of the dynamic strength of either gender.
Differences in both genders should be celebrated and not forced. In other
words, males and females have the right to express their individuality without
adhering to stereotypical gender roles unconditionally. We have to understand
that males and yes females have the right to embrace leadership (as found in
the human beings of ,Deborah, Huldah, Junia, Priscilla, and many others),
embrace power, and embrace compassion for the human race. Authoritarian hierarchy
always falls on its head. Even Jesus said the following: “The last will be
first and the first will be last,” he said (Matthew 20:16). “Whoever is
considered greatest among you must become like a servant,” he said (Matthew
23:11). The concept of patriarchy is a cultural idea that men should exercise
unilateral authority over all households and generally over all society. This
concept has been exploited in such a reactionary direction that its precepts
have been used to harm women the world over. Worldwide, women ages fifteen to
forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from
cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined. Every 9 seconds, a woman
in the US is assaulted or beaten. Around the world, at least one in every three
women has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused during her
lifetime. Even radical patriarchy advocates like the error filled figure John
Piper has said that in order to model godly submission, a woman may need to
quietly “endure verbal abuse for a season” or “getting smacked one night”
before “seeking help from the church.” (He says nothing about contacting
authorities). Piper is sick and wrong to mention such words. The reality
is that a woman's dignity is worth not advocating some dictatorial male
hierarchy. That is why when you research information, empowering women
increases economic productivity, reduces infant mortality, improves health, and
grows education. Several studies from UNICEF suggest that when women are given
control over the family spending, more of the money gets devoted to education,
medical care, and small business endeavors than when men control the purse
strings. Studies have shown the many benefits of an egalitarian marriage. Patriarchy
to the extreme is related to Greco-Roman household codes and white supremacist
Eurocentric cultural standards point blank period. Even Jesus Christ came to
preach a kingdom that transcends archaic cultural systems. In the final
analysis, males and females are one. We have our similarities and differences,
but we are one in the human family. Mutual peace, love, mutual respect, mutual
leadership, mutual support, and mutual grace are concepts I hold dear in my
heart.
Now,
black African women in African civilization were highly revered long ago. The
Black African woman is special. From her, all of humanity came from her. Ancient
Africans had a deep seated respect for women. Ancient humans viewed males and
females as complements of each other and harmony between the two was necessary
to cause social stability in the Earth. That is why when advance the wellbeing
of males and females, then the world is better and humanity grows. Mother
Africa always had civilizations who greatly respected women. In ancient Egypt
and ancient Kush, there was a great importance placed for the Mother. That is
why in both ancient civilizations, the mother was seen in the great importance.
Children took their surname from the mother and the mother controlled in many
times the household and the fields. In Kush, the Queen Mother had the right to
choose the next Pharaoh. Prior to Islamic conquest of sub-Saharan Africa
in the 12th and 13th centuries, the system of succession to
the throne was matrilineal. Cheikh Anta Diop in his book Pre-colonial
Black Africa explains
that in the African custom of matrilineal succession, very strict rules were
observed which stated that the heir of the throne was not the king’s son but
the son of the King’s first-born sister (the king’s nephew). This is because,
as an African proverb states, “…You
can never be sure who the father of the child is; but of the mother you can
always be sure." That means that the conference of power and titles of
leadership were reckoned through the mother's line in many African kingdoms.
Many African cultures were matriarchal and shown respect for women. Women had a
great deal of power. The erosion of the status of women occurred gradually and
increased by white supremacist Eurocentric invasions of the Motherland. It is a
white supremacist Eurocentric ideology to degrade the woman and make her less
in position to a man (instead of equal to a man). The status and power of women
in Africa during ancient times were very high. They were not treated as second
class citizens. Among the Kikuyu of Kenya, women were the
major food producers and thus not only had ready access to land but also had
AUTHROITY of how the land was to be used and cultivated. In ancient Africa,
women were leading spiritual figures. African women were well known, great, and
powerful leaders like Queen Tiye, the Candaces of ancient Nubia, Sarraounia,
Ana de Sousa Nzinga, and so many other Sisters. NO NATION CAN RISE ABOVE ITS
WOMAN POINT BLANK PERIOD.
By
Timothy
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