Monday News

We have to do both. We should improve our morality (that means that families must be strengthened, we have to work in our communities to assist our people, we should promote righteous codes of conduct for our communities, etc. In other words, we should always treat each other with fairness. There is nothing wrong with working in community, grassroots programs to help our people. I have no issue with the establishment of more independent organizations or groups that deal with assisting black people too) and confront the conditions confronting our people. That means that we also should fight poverty, discrimination, class oppression, racism, and other ills. We have to develop our own lives individually and collectively handle the other issues in our community. It will take a village to solve our problems as an African proverb has proven. Mentorships, real trades (that deals with building things, analyzing information, and dealing with math plus the sciences), and other actions ought to be promoted in our community in a higher level. We should ally with our people who want results (and seek to develop our economic power via group economics). Some are right that real power can grow via strong morality. We have to be honest in how we got in the condition that we're in and we have to go and be realistic. We should not be nihilists, but I disagree with victim blaming for every problem in the black community. We have a very long way to go, but we have to have hope for the future. In the final analysis, people should do something (like mentoring the youth, working to advance independent schools teaching Brothers & Sisters the truth, working in fighting poverty, working in organizations that are fighting criminal justice issues for real, working to help black people involving health improvement, and establishing infrastructures that can assist the black community for real). We can be creative and use innovation. The disturbing video shows what the truth is (which is that black life is readily mistreated. Houseman is still alive while John Crawford III is dead). Angela's death has been ruled a homicide. Conversely, the life of John Crawford has been blatantly disrespected by the police authorities. The young Brother never deserved to be murdered at all. The cops once again got off in their killing. We have seen this story again and again. The judicial system has been futile & anemic in really holding crooked cops totally accountable for their ridiculously obscene actions. I am in solidarity with the family of John Crawford III.


People should know about the ebola crisis. We see that the large magnitude of the virus deals with the lax infrastructure and the conditions of the health systems. Thousands of people have died and millions are at risk because of the social conditions in many West African nations. These nations have been oppressed and exploited by imperialist powers and neo-colonial forces. Ebola is spread only by direct contact with bodily fluids and self-limited in isolated in rural areas mostly (because of its location). We see that this current epidemic began in rural Guinea and it spread into neighboring Sierra Leone including Liberia. Liberia with its urban communities saw massive victims of ebola too. Its capital city of Monrovia is having the outbreak as well, which is tragic. The local health care systems have been harmed too. Many hospitals in West Africa have been closed, because few resources available for treatment or assistance. These nations are rich in natural resources, but have been ruthlessly exploited by major corporations and the imperialist powers that enforce their interests. Liberia and Sierra Leone have great people who need help. We see British and UN troops occupying Sierra Leone and U.S. Marines landing in Liberia. West Africans don’t need pledges alone. They need donations, supplies, equipment, and healthcare personnel. There has been much more billions of dollars sent to fight ISIS, but only 1 billion dollars sent by the West to West Africa. James Hudson and Sister Jemima Pierre are right to expose how double standards in this situation relate to racism. Many white missionaries have received experimental drugs and are virtually cured, yet such treatment is not sent to the victims over in West Africa in a massive scale (there were courageous African doctors saving lives too like Dr. Sheik Umar Khan from Sierra Leona. He was a great physician, but he was denied the chance by Doctors without Borders to receive the ZMAP experimental drug which was given to 2 white missionaries). These victims are our Brothers and Sisters. To add insult to injury, the U.S. government first announced that a $22-million, 25-bed Ebola hospital was intended for foreign (read: mainly white) healthcare workers. While outrage forced the U.S. to include African health workers in its plans, it was – and has been – clear that African lives don’t matter (in the eyes of racists and extremists). The truth is that black lives do matter. Black human life has been disrespected by the status quo for a long time. There is the cholera situation in Haiti too (as brought by the UN into Haiti during the fall of 2010). The UN has militarily occupied Haiti since 2004. There must be economic justice and freedom in the world.



In life, we should realize what is most important. One weakness of mainstream popular culture is that it is readily obsessed with money and materialism. Materialism can not only destroy the mind and the body, but it can destroy the soul too. We know that an oligarchy has inordinate power in the world. There has been an Elite using their power to not only control as much of society as possible, but to use propaganda as a means to brainwash the masses of the people. This is not just me typing these words. The existence of nefarious coups, political groups influencing society, and economic inequality has been documented by human beings from across the political spectrum. Obviously, we are not totally free. We know that select, big corporations (who are owned by the select, wealthy groups of families like the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Saxe-Coburg Gothas, the Nobility, etc.) use their mass media, the government, Wall Street, etc. to dominate including monopolize the majority of the world’s wealth and natural resources. That is why the one percent has a huge say in the events of Asia, Europe, the Americas, Africa, etc. We know that many doctors promote a health care system that is dominated by big pharmaceutical companies instead of a single payer system. We realize that some teaching curriculums are not healthy for students. The justice system is heavily corrupted and politicians follow the two party system (which has not built up revolutionary solutions in the world). Many in the mainstream media promote lies and half-truths constantly. The truth is obvious. Many corporate interests want to distort the educational system in America (true education is about people analyzing information and applying it in their lives. True education is about people thinking for themselves. We should be independent, natural, and spontaneous thinkers). The corporate owned media have shown lies in their coverage. We certainly know that Hollywood movies, the industry, and TV programming show propaganda, social engineering, and other parts of the elite’s agenda constantly. Big Pharma has a huge say in our current healthcare system. We have a corporate oligarchy and not a true democratic free society. Our environment (including our air, water, and Earth) has been poisoned by toxic foods, chemicals in the water, GMOs, etc. The big banks have used the current economic system to promote austerity, credit card companies, etc. to harm the economic rights of the masses of the people. That is why we need to express courage in opposing injustice. We can dream and not only dream. We need strategies, a program, and action too. The ancients knew of true wisdom and this wisdom has been suppressed heavily by the establishment, so the common people can’t witness it or use it to liberate themselves. The ancients readily were off the grid, they use volunteering to help people, they started their own revolutionary changes, many of the ancients rejected imperialism, they respected Nature, they worked as a community to develop families, and they had other wisdom that we can believe in today. Life is about improvement, it is about the love of humanity, and it is about working to help Nature and the world in general.


The “culture of poverty” motif has been used by some as a slick code word to promote not only racism, but class oppression as well. The culture of poverty lie deals with the lie that black culture (not the economic oppression, racism, discrimination, etc.) is to be blamed for the situation in the black community. It is rather silly to blame black culture or cultural pathologies for oppression. Reactionaries ignore the history of racial oppression as a means to falsely blame the black poor for their own suffering. Sociologists and other scholars like Donald Braman prove that families of prisoners feel shame not joy over their loved ones being incarcerated. No real person is happy to glamorize the brutality of prison life. In fact, recent research by Ivory Toldson suggests that it is white male students who express the most ambivalence about the impact of good grades on their social standing. By contrast, 95 percent of Black female students reported that, if they did really well in school, they would be proud and tell all of their friends about it. Similarly, Black students were most likely to report that their friends would be happier if they went TO COLLEGE than if they didn't. Most white students said their friends wouldn't care either way. It is not just the Tea Party crowd talking about pound cake and blaming the poor for their own plight, but many Democrats too. Mass incarceration, joblessness in American cities, and poverty must be addressed. There is the myth of the black unemployed collectively don’t want to find work. Since the 1960s, social scientists have produced study after study demonstrating that poor and unemployed black Americans have basically the same attitudes towards work as the rest of country. In fact, a recent study found that Black job seekers are even more resilient than their white counterparts, staying in the job market longer despite persistent frustrations of their search for employment. We know that most black fathers and most black mothers are involved in the lives of their children regardless if their families are nuclear or not. We know that most people on welfare suffer problems, they work heavily, and factors like discrimination & joblessness contributes to some getting welfare (not because of laziness). We have to do more than to build families, promote real education, and believe in ethics. There must be full employment, a creation of a program for redistributive solutions, a strengthening of anti-discrimination measures, advance equal access to health care, and deal with social conditions of society. You can speak perfect English, exist from a nuclear family, follow the rules of mainstream society, etc. and you can still be oppressed by the same oppressive system. The culture of poverty narrative is not only false, but it doesn’t solve the problems of our communities either. It is Western capitalism that caused massive inequalities of Western society not the victims of oppression. We need revolutionary solutions.


It should be obvious to anyone that the criminal justice system is unfair to black people. There has been so much documented evidence of unfair sentencing practices against black people, of black people being brutalized, and of the epidemic of police brutality that a vast majority of Americans (beyond 51%) should believe that the criminal justice system is heavily unfair to black people. The reality is that the one percent knows what they do. At this point, we certainly need strategies, plans, and action. It is highly immoral to blame the victims of oppression collectively for their oppression. The system is a disgrace and that is why people day in and day out are fighting against not only the War on Drugs, but against the injustices found in the prison industrial complex too. Black people have the right to stand up against corruption and injustice. We certainly have a very long way to go, but we should not use that as an excuse to embrace apathy or defeat. Our ancestors suffered a lot worse than we suffer today. Therefore, we should carry onward and fight the good fight continuously. Regardless of how people feel about the President or Eric Holder, that doesn’t escape our responsibility to mentor people, to stand up for our human rights, to defend our people, and to be active in creating solutions. One lesson of the Freedom Movement decades ago is that it proved how powerful grassroots community organization was. That same spirit of cooperation among each other (as a community since it will take a village to solve our issues) should exist in a higher level in our time too. We should not only stand up for voting rights. We should speak out against corporate greed and how unfair subsidies have benefited massive multinational corporations while the poor suffer economic injustices. Before Dr. King was assassinated, he was fighting for economic justice (for Memphis sanitation workers and for people in general). There can be no real, meaningful change in society unless discrimination and poverty are addressed fully. This is what our Brothers and our Sisters back decades ago wanted (from Fannie Lou Hamer to Ella Baker). Claudette Colvin is a great hero and more people should know about her (and her courage in the fight for freedom).

By Timothy