Monday News on March 2, 2015

Blood, sweat, and tears from Brothers and Sisters caused the Civil Rights Act to exist. The evil of legalized apartheid, known as Jim Crow, was ended by the work of millions of African American workers, the youth, the poor, and many people of many backgrounds. The civil rights struggle represented an egalitarian impulse where people fought for the improvement of living standards and the expansion of democratic human rights for all people. The Civil Rights Act (which banned racial segregation in public facilities, forbade discrimination in hiring, and restrict unequal application of voter registration requirements) was signed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson on July 2, 1964. From the moment when the law was signed, the Republicans became the most racist and reactionary component of the American political establishment. After the bill became law, racist violence swept the South. Legal apartheid (or the system of white supremacy using segregation as a way to deprive black people of human rights) being gone is great, but we still face economic oppression. Legal equality is not enough when there is immense poverty in America and deindustrialization has crippled many cities of the North for so long. Even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came about with this conclusion by the late 1960’s. Racial oppression and class exploitation go hand in hand. That is why people need not only political freedom, but economic justice as well. The more times have changed, the more some things remain the same. Back then and today, reactionaries like Rudy Giuliani (including his supporters in FOX News) distort crime statistics as a means to demonize black people and they try to justify police violence in our communities. 50 years ago, in Selma, the police used dogs including water cannons including billy clubs on the protesters. Today, the cops have used sound weapons and tear gas on protesters in Ferguson and all across America. Back then, many establishment figures supported the humanitarian bombing of the Congo. Today, many deluded establishment people support humanitarian bombings of sovereign territories in the name of “democracy.” Malcolm X had a very much honest appraisal of the situation. Malcolm X said that the U.S. government (among all levels) failed the black people of America by refusing to enforce anti-racist laws and outright oppressed the black community. This is why Malcolm X wanted to promote human rights and take America to international court for its violations of the human rights of black Americans. Malcolm X believed that freedom doesn’t have to be enacted by proclamations from Congress or the President. Freedom should ours by birthright. He’s right. We are free, because we are human. We exist, so no one should deprive us of our freedom at all.




The Washington Post recently revealed the identity of “Jihadi John” as Mohammed Emwazi. He is a 26 year old man who was born in Kuwait and he was raised in London. Mohammed Emwazi has been responsible for the many beheadings of Westerners. He was featured in the beheading of the U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff (including the British workers named Davis Haines and Alan Henning). Mohammed Emwazi came from a well to do family in West London. He graduated from college with a degree in computer programming. The mainstream media is reporting on this identification and some are having discussions on the motivations of Islamist extremists. People speculate why a man with such a background who do barbaric actions. Also, we know that “Jihadi John” was well known to British intelligence. They can easily identify him using voice and image recognition technology. MI5 or the British security service carefully tracked his movements. Some question whether the MI5 also used an active campaign to recruit him as an informant and covert agent. As the British daily Guardian put it Thursday, MI5 has “serious questions” to answer about its relations with Emwazi. It is clear where other ISIS jihadists have been.  The BBC reported that British intelligence has refused to name Emwazi for “operational reasons.” It adds: “The practice by intelligence agencies of approaching jihadist sympathizers to work for them is likely to continue. It’s believed both Britain and the US have informers inside the Islamic State ‘capital’ of Raqqa. Yet this seems to have been little help in stopping the actions of Mohammed Emwazi, or bringing him to justice.” The case of Emwazi is that there is a relationship between Western imperialism and ISIS. ISIS is the product of the interventions of Washington and its allies in the region. These terrorist groups like ISIS haven’t existed in Iraq or Syria including Libya until the 2nd decade of the 21st century. Western imperialism caused secular Arabic governments in all three nations to topple. The West caused death, mayhem, and destruction. Over million lives have been killed during the war on terror. ISIS like Al-Qaeda is a creation of Western imperialism. Even in Libya, many terrorists are now allied with ISIS. ISIS has over 20,000 people with recruit from Central Asia, Europe, North America, etc. Turkey, which is an U.S. ally, has facilitated people to go into Syria to fight for ISIS. The Islamist forces on the ground in Syria felt themselves the victims of a double-cross. Much like the CIA’s Cuban counterrevolutionaries at the Bay of Pigs a half-century earlier, their promised US air support did not come and they lashed out in retribution. Ultimately, this took the form not only of the serial beheadings of Western hostages, but also the debacle inflicted upon the US-trained security forces in Iraq. ISIS has killed many of the Assyrian Christian community in North Eastern Syria. ISIS is an evil, counterrevolutionary group. Many of them have destroyed much of their art and culture, which spans thousands of years. The deaths of innocent human life should be condemned. The government of Washington has been largely taken over by the military and the intelligence apparatus and its crimes are cover up by the complicit corporate controlled mainstream media. The anti-war movement must continue to oppose imperialism and to seek justice for the people of the Middle East.



The 2015 CPAC meeting has just ended. This is a meeting where Republican Presidential candidates vie for support among conservatives. CPAC stands for the Conservative Political Action Conference. The meeting was held in suburban Washington D.C. and Rand Paul won the straw poll. One controversy (out of many) in the conference was when Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin said that if he could take on 100,000 protesters (who were the brave working class and student youth who protested in Madison in 2011), and then he could take on ISIS. Walker was one man who passed anti-working rights laws and he defeated many of the unions in Wisconsin. Even ex-Texas Governor Ricky Perry said that his comments were inappropriate. Walker denies trying to compare protesters to ISIS terrorists. Walker was given standing ovations for his remarks there including his words about protesters and terrorists. Scott Walker is leading polls in Iowa and throughout America. He could be the Republican Presidential nominee. The Koch Brothers are funding the Republicans heavily in 2015 and will do so in 2016. It is true that the sick American political elite view protesters as a threat just like they show the view of battle ISIS in Iraq, Syria, etc. Only a month ago, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton (who was appointed by the liberal Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio) announced plans for a Special Response unit of about 350 highly trained paramilitary police. Bratton said that this unit will be used to deal with protesters or incidents like in Mumbai or what happened in Paris. He equated peaceful marches against the official whitewash of police murders in New York City to the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine that killed 10 people and the Mumbai massacre killed almost 200 human beings. Bratton's comments was inappropriate. Bratton said that he only misspoken and there are two separate elite police units, one to kill terrorists, and the other to arrest demonstrators. There is not similarity between peaceful protesters and terrorism at all. Peaceful protesters have been demonized and slandered by some members of the NYPD and others.

We all sympathize with Melissa Harris Perry's indignant anger at the injustice of a vigilante (who wasn't a cop and he stalked Trayvon) killing an unarmed child named Trayvon Martin. Stand Your Ground is a reactionary law, which has ambiguity in its legal components. Zimmerman is a sick man and he said that it was God's plan for him to kill Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman is totally evil. RIP Trayvon Martin. The more that I research about Detroit's history and culture, the more that I see its revolutionary history. Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave important, strong speeches in Detroit. Many people in Detroit came from the Deep South to escape the exploitative nature of sharecropping. Later on, massive deindustrialization came, urban renewal had grown, there was the major 1967 rebellion in the city (which came about in opposition to racism, police brutality, and economic oppression), and many jobs were shipped overseas. This caused people to suffer and we have seen how the war on drugs has devastated communities in Detroit including nationwide. Many big corporations and big banks gotten the resources from the city as well. Kwame Kilpatrick can never blame anyone for his mistakes, but himself. It is as simple as that. Kilpatrick's life is a lesson on how we, as black people, must not only promote excellence. We have to study the past mistakes of others, so we can create a better future for us, for our families, for our friends, and for our posterity. I do understand that Kilpatrick should not be blamed for all of the problems in Detroit. The recent financial crisis has hurt Detroit too. Today, people are still fighting in Detroit. The people of Detroit are very resilient. Detroit exited bankruptcy on December 2014. That's good. We still have a long way to go. They (or the people of Detroit) are strong and we respect the fighting spirit of the people of Detroit. The next mayor could be white and the new mayor could be black. We should reject self-hatred and any inferiority complexes (as we should never worship a "white savior." Kilpatrick has talked about this issue. We all respect black strength. Black Unity is important to advance), but we, as black people, should not justify overt mistakes done by anyone. I don't know the future. What I do know is that the best qualified, imaginative, and progressive human being deserves to be the new mayor of Detroit.



Malcolm X had a rapid political evolution in the last year of his life. He met with many heads of the state who were anti-imperialist or pro-nationalist like Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Sekou Toure of Guinea Conakry. His international travels gave him a broader outlook on how the world works. He exposed the psychology of evil international oppression. Also, it is important to note that societies must have working class emancipation and workers’ power. We need not only freedom from colonialism, but we need to extinguish economic corruption once societies are free. Also, Malcolm X wanted to work with the Southern black freedom struggle. In the fall of 1964, Martin Luther King Jr., asked by a reporter about Malcolm's break with the NOI, said, "I look forward to working with him." Malcolm supported the fight for voting rights in Selma, Ala., traveling there to meet with representatives of civil rights groups to try to formulate a common strategy as the bloody confrontation--depicted in the recent movie Selma--finally forced President Lyndon Johnson to begin to move on voting rights legislation. Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King's wife, met with Malcolm while King was in jail. "He wanted to present an alternative; that it might be easier for whites to accept Martin's proposals after hearing him," Coretta King recalled. "He seemed sincere." Just days before his death, Malcolm told a group of Columbia University students that it was "incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of Black against white, or as purely an American problem. Rather, we are seeing today a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter." Courageous black revolutionary organization came about with influence from Malcolm X like Black Panther Party for self-defense (of Oakland), and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. We should understand our revolutionary history, so a just future can exist. We have to not only talk about these issues. We have to do the work. In other words, we have to support genuine liberation movements. We have to teach our people the value and greatness of blackness. We have to confront anyone disrespecting black people and we have to fight against misogyny. We have to work in our communities and be part of the solution. No civilization is great unless it treats women as equal human beings. We have to sacrifice since sacrifice can bring positive results. We deserve justice without exception.


By Timothy