Real Truths near 2014

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 12^th and 13^th 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