RIP Ruby Dee.

Ruby Dee walked her talk. She was an active person in the black liberation struggle. She was a true, real Black Queen who expressed honesty, dignity, strength, and courage in her life. She and her husband Ossie Davis were a great team. When I was younger, I saw their movie specials every weekend. They educated, inspired, and showed love to human beings. The elders are increasingly passing away and we in this time have the responsibility to do our jobs. Ruby Dee had done excellent actions when she was alive. Ruby Dee was a friend to Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. too. She is now reunited with her husband forever more. We are the future without question. My friend and great Sister Courtney is right to mention that we should outline what our job is (in dealing with helping our communities, doing real action, etc.) to the ones behind us. :) Ruby Dee was a true humanitarian. Her social activism from fighting police brutality to defending human rights is inspiring. I have a great respect for intelligence, human decency and dignity too just like others. Too many people are concerned with selfishness instead of true human character. Her husband was a fighter like her. Ossie Davis gave a great, eloquent speech about Malcolm X too. The bond between Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis was unbreakable. Ruby Dee knew that she would never find a man like Ossie Davis. That strength, which each person had, is real. It is amazing to understand the excellent contributions of the Queens Ruby, Maya, and Cicely Tyson. Yes, Cicely Tyson is still alive. Also, Ruby had a wonderful life and a great spirit. Her spirit is still with us, her spirit is in the rest of our people, and her spirit is in the entire human family. Ruby Dee was a great actress too. Ruby Dee would want us to have fun and to be conscious of real issues and our purposes in life. :) Their romantic story is a blessing. True love will last a long time. The love that each human being had is eternal. Yes, African Americans have every right to have romance. LOL. :) You can tell that Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis' love was for real. Respect for both genders is a key part of human existence. The couple certainly represents what a real marriage is all about and the necessity for us to continue their work. They wanted economic justice, civil rights, and the love of Africa to be placed in our hearts. RIP Ruby Dee.


There is obviously a crisis in Iraq. The Sunni militia group called ISIS has overrun Mosul. Mosul is Iraq’s second largest city with a population of about 2 million human beings. ISIS is an offshoot of Al-Qaeda. They are using a massive offensive in Iraq. They took Tikrit or the hometown of the former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Also, they have taken other towns on the Tigris River valley. They seek to travel into Baghdad. The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has thrown Iraqi Special Forces units along with volunteers raised form the Shia population into a defensive line north of the capital in hopes of breaking the ISIS advance. America is beginning to evacuate thousands of its military and intelligence contractors who are deployed in Iraq. There are numerous discussions about what to do about the giant U.S. embassy in Baghdad as well. It is the largest embassy on Earth. This even is a huge debacle and the entire policy of Iraq originated with the Bush administration (including far back to the early 20th century). The Obama administration has continued the Bush policy on Iraq in similar ways as well. The crisis (if not ended) could cause Iraq to go into a total sectarian civil war. We already have the bloody civil war in Syria, which has been provoked by the West and its allies. Two and a half years ago, Washington needed massive occupation and war in Iraq. The Iraq caused the deaths of one million Iraqis and thousands of Americans. The Middle East region is threatened by this new Iraqi conflict. “I don’t rule out anything,” President Barack Obama said Thursday in response to White House reporters’ question about a potential US military response to the ISIS offensive. Describing the crisis in Iraq as an “emergency situation,” the US president said that it was clear that the Iraqi regime of President Nouri Maliki is “going to need more help.” The White House has responded that they are open to U.S. air bombardments and drone missile strikes. The White House also has pledged to send shipments (of Hellfire missiles along with millions of rounds of small arms ammunition, thousands of tank rounds, grenades, machine guns and assault rifles) to the Iraqi military. These armaments will not come until a few weeks from now. The Iraqi army has deserted in many cases after fighting ISIS. Some have even discarded their uniforms as a means to flee the Islamist radical guerillas. The U.S. military has spent 25 billion dollars and nearly a decade to train the Iraqi military. There are 2,000-3,000 ISIS fighters. Many videos show ISIS fighters having hundreds if not thousands of soldiers taken prisoner. The U.S. occupation caused the Maliki regime to exist. There is a national state of emergency in Iraq. Some ISIS forces have set up ex-Baathist officers as heads of local government in areas of Iraq. Iraq has sectarian issues. There are divisions between Sunnis and Shia. Both sides have innocent people who have been murdered. Maliki has wrongly treated all political opposition in Sunni areas as terrorism, even peaceful protests. Maliki has called the struggle against ISIS as holy war, which inflames tensions between Sunnis and Shias. The Kurdish military force, the peshmerga, has taken control of all of the city of Kirkuk in northeastern Iraq after the Iraqi military melted away there too. The city, which is a key center of Iraq’s oil industry, is divided between Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, but the Kurdish movement has always claimed it as its capital. US occupation authorities forced the peshmerga to relinquish control of Kirkuk after they took it during the 2003 invasion and afterwards opposed any joining of the city to the nearby autonomous Kurdish region. Turkey and Iran has threatened to intervene in Iraq over the actions of ISIS. Turkey doesn’t like its Turkish people kidnapped and Iran has Shia links to Iraq. Unconfirmed reports mention that Iraq has sent an unit of the Revolutionary Guards Quds Force into Iraq to assist in the struggle against ISIS and has beefed up military forces on the Iraqi border. This situation is a product of the evils of imperialism. U.S. imperialists claim to support Maliki in Iraq against ISIS, but similar Al-Qaeda forces are supported by the West via proxy in Syria. ISIS is called a terrorist organization by Washington, but some of these same forces are fighting in Syria to cause regime change. The terrorism done by ISIS and Western imperialists both should be condemned. The actions of ISIS & imperialists only harm the region causing more ethnic and religious strife.

Adam Kokesh is wrong on many levels. He is one of those radical libertarian extremists that fail to see the complexities of poverty and other socioeconomic realities. The reality is that laissez faire capitalism has not worked to institute a radical decrease in poverty. In fact, the policies of austerity, tax breaks, and tax cuts for the super wealthy have increased income inequality. Radically cutting food stamps while enriching the power of corporate interests (which is Kokesh's agenda) does nothing to assist all of the people. Obviously, the killers (who are Jerad and Amanda Miller) are murderers. Kokesh is wrong in his views on these murderers. They or the killers should not be respected at all. There is more information documenting how the founding fathers of the modern Libertarian Party are linked to the ruling class. The elite’s Mont Pelerin Society for decades have promoted neoliberalism, austerity, and other reactionary actions. The 1 percenters had used extremists as a means to advance their dynasties, steal more wealth, and control more of the people. Moreover, the famous lawyer Kohlberg was a major sponsor of Plain Talk, which merged with the Freeman; a libertarian journal still published today by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), itself a direct offshoot of the William Volker Fund and an active supporter of the Mont Pelerin Society. It was Miller who introduced Luhnow to Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek and convinced him to bring Hayek to Chicago. Miller went on to oversee the activities of the Volker Fund and attended the first Mont Pelerin Society meeting. In fact, both the Volker Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation supported the Mont Pelerin gatherings for over a decade. So, the Rockefeller Foundation has funded Austrian economics and organizations in support of Austrian economics for years. This is the smoking gun that proves that the 1 percent advances deregulation, economic injustice, and the IMF for years. Importantly, the involvement of the Rockefeller dynasty in promoting Austrian economics predates the Volker Fund. Indeed, Rockefeller, who was taught by Hayek in London, “had been intermittently subsidizing Hayek since his Vienna days at Mises’ business cycle institute” according to Mirowski and Van Horn. Already in 1926, Ludwig von Mises’s first tour in the United States was paid by the Rockefeller Foundation. The National Bureau of Economic Research, which supported Mises in the 1940s, was also heavily sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. Mises’s salary in New York was paid by Lawrence Fertig, Kohlberg’s colleague at the AJLAC, and by the Volker Fund. We don’t need the government and private interests harming the public. We need the people to control the government, so a progressive government can advance the needs and aspirations of the people. We need a level playing field, strong social safety net, an end to Empire, and a real policy of justice.


Even Edward Bernays wrote about the propaganda aspects of the mass media. So, we have to understand that the corporate media readily outlines distractions, deceptions (like it did during the run-up to the Iraq War), and obfuscation (because the corporate media will never talk about our real history and our real struggle for liberation in an uncompromising fashion). We need to do action too. All of our heroes (from Harriet Tubman to Patrice Lumumba) advocate action against oppression. As Dr. King has said, the oppressor never voluntarily relinquishes his power to the oppressed. Therefore, we have every right to speak out, to build in our own community, to love our people, and to fight courageously against injustice. There are many independent organizations that are doing what is right. We need more reading in our community (as you, Sister Jeanette Johnson, and Brother EXODUS) have greatly mentioned too. Many of the youth are being told that anti-intellectualism and nihilism are legitimate when these acts are evil. Some of the youth are awaken. We have a long way to go without question. The hope that the documentary called Black Church Inc. will inspire black religious people and all people in general for that matter to expose and condemn the prosperity gospel to the fullest extent. Since I was a youth, I never respected that faux gospel. Also, religious and non-religious leaders have done great work in exposing the prosperity gospel agenda for years. Not to mention that one poster is right that we should learn more about our history, our culture, etc. as a means for us to build in our own communities. We have to know ourselves in order to better ourselves. There are numerous people who walk the talk involving the Gospel. Many of them are unsung and their stories are not readily known. We know more of the scandals, because the scandals make a lot of waves. Those who misuse the Gospel or spirituality for the sake of economic benefit or greed are some of the lowest people in the world. The corrupt religious leaders do make it harder for people to trust spirituality in general. A true church ought to teach people social enlightenment and how to better the self (and the community in general, because the community ought to be improved upon if we want to see revolutionary changes bear fruit so to speak). A real religious location ought to use money to help the sick, to help the poor, and to give comfort to humanity. The prosperity gospel makes a mockery of the Gospel. The good news is that many people are waking up. LOVE is superior to the mismanagement or even the nefarious exploitation of funds, in my humble opinion.


When I have researched Republican and Democratic Presidents in the past decades, I see the same pattern. They are funded by the same corporate interests. They are part of the same engine of oppression against our community. Many of them advance blatantly reactionary policies. Carter and Reagan radically deregulated industries. Clinton and Bush Jr. advanced the blatantly racist War on Drugs, mass incarceration, and bad trade deals for years. Truman advanced aggressive Cold War policies too (he consented to the dropping of two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945—incinerating hundreds of thousands instantly and subjecting millions more to cancer—even generals winced like Dwight D. Eisenhower). There is nothing radically left wing about these Presidents. The Democrats in their leadership have been just as much involved in war mongering as the Republicans. That is why many Democrats voted for the Iraq War just like the Republicans. Our condition has not radically improved either since the late 1970's. That is why revolutionary solutions are needed to help us as a community. You have shown interesting information. At the end of the day, humanity needs jobs, education, adequate housing, affordable health care, and other rights that all human beings deserve. There must be a revolutionary transformation of the social order where democratic rights are maintained and the neo-feudal ideology of austerity is purely repudiated. Also, I still believe in revolutionary solutions. There must be active political involvement in the world as a means for us to transform it and make it better for humanity. Our people will have to continue to struggle for justice excluding accommodation to the status quo. We need an end to imperialism and the blatantly destructive War on Drugs. I will always agree with workers' rights, with environmental justice, with racial justice, with human rights, with universal health care, and with economic justice (as the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. accurately said, we need a radical redistribution of economic and political power to address the needs of the poor & all oppressed peoples. I will never bow down to crony capitalism. I am opposed to monopoly capitalism for capitalism is not God. I will believe in social democratic power & that people power is important too).


By Timothy