The Evolution Conundrum

I have been thinking about this proposition, the relationship between evolution and revolution since I read a recent comment by Amenta:

“…This post is a reflection as to why my personal concepts center around an evolution rather than a revolution. The world is being revealed to an extent as never before. So many hidden agendas are being exposed that we are going to have to take personal account of our own being, our own families extending outward into our neighborhood and onto the greater collective immediately surrounding us…

There will be no revolution, no unity, no moving forward without gaining a detailed understanding of who we are individually and internally. And, just how our mere existence is inter-related to one another and to the systems around us. Lets face it, we have a broken people we are dealing with. We are dealing with people who have been personally abused whether in childhood or as adults in relationships, whether physically, mentally or sexually that have to be overcome and yet the individual must find a way to come to terms with these issues before great progress can be made. This is part and parcel of an internal evolution that needs to be addressed.

Outside of that, self introspection is required of those of us that may not have had to deal with such abuse, but still we have allowed the world to cow us down to become that self-centered “i gotta get mines” being. Living on a survival level of existence.”

When you hand an ill-formed, nascent, wounded someone, a philosophy, a religion, a political heritage, the necessary evolution of the individual is short circuited. Nowhere in this culture – not the family, not the school, not the church – is one supported in gaining a “detailed understanding” of themselves “individually and internally.”

Thus, you have a population composed of educated fools, people with more books and informational resources available to them than any other people on the planet.

This country prides itself on the “rugged individualism” that birthed it, so the mythology goes. And yet, where are today’s evolved individuals? Where are the deep thinkers? Where are the people who made it their way?!

In jazz, there once was a concept called the “signature sound.”  Jazz musicians were strongly encouraged to developed their instrument’s voice so that it was unique to them. Rather than copying ‘Bird’ or ‘Diz’, the idea was to sound militantly like yourself. And if you ever listen to a song featuring Miles or Jackie Mac or Sonny Rollins or Trane, within seconds, you hear, not notes, but them.

Today, one trumpet sounds like a million others, every rapper says the same shit, every movie has the same manipulative structures and tugs at the same surface-y heartstrings. One’s personal, militant evolution is strangled at birth, stunted and siphoned into an externalized, dehumanized cadaver.

There’s one side or the other, politically. The idea that there are other pathways, or highways of thought, rather than a two lane road does not occur to the Amerikkkan because the notion of intellectual abundance is bred out of them. The preparation for thinking dualistically is born in childhood with the indoctrinated parent who teaches conformity to the status quo, not liberty from it, regardless of class or race.

Corralling and controlling the kitties, rather than observing the fascinating ways in which they think is de rigueur. The controlled kittens need a job, don’t they and the parent and the teacher know that if their little kitty doesn’t fit in, no employer will take them.

In most cases, being an evolved human being is revolutionary suicide.

Evolution is a precursor to a revolution, it seems to me. A great change within a small community or in a larger scale sense requires a shift within a significant number of people. And this great change can only occur if enough of these evolved types unite and fashion a vision of this change that inspires the nascent spirits in the larger community.

The people with power have great vision and they understand that in order to keep power, they must throw water on the fires of evolutionary growth and development. They must make sure that the schools train, but don’t educate. They must make sure that financial pressures are such that people live hand to mouth, hand to mortgage, hand to student loan repayment. These kinds of pressures dampen the evolutionary/revolutionary spirit and turn flower beds into swamps.

Thus, we take the easy way out and vote. We look at the two options offered us and pick one, though there is no difference besides the cosmetic between them. We numb ourselves with our mortgage, our music, our meals. We pick up the staff and lead the other deadened sheep to the stockyard. And we are too dead to notice.

I think Amenta’s point is on point: we owe it to ourselves to set aside our training, our brainwashing, our patterned rigidity, first, by SEEING IT! No easy task because most of us have a rosier view of our upbringings and our current reality than the actual reality of it.

I would suggest to anyone so inclined, to question everything; to consider that everything they have learned from the crib was designed to mold you, rather than help you be you. Imagine it, sit with it. Just ask yourself if you were allowed to be, or if you had to be what your parents and teachers and employers wanted you to be.

And ask yourself if you are an evolutionary being, someone who is truly in relationship with the self, asking questions, examining/allowing your feelings, insecurities, traumas, victories, discarding old skins, growing new ones.

WE can’t, if I won’t, if I won’t look into me and get butt nekkid with myself and try to heal. And if I do that work and you do that work and she does that work and he does that work, perhaps it is with those/within those that the revolution lies.

I have used the term revolution often in the past, believe we need a massive revolution still. However, I believe that Amenta is right. No real revolution without evolution, is possible, and is decidedly undesirable.

Maybe the real revolution is when we create an environment that supports and allows us all to evolve into the butterflies that we are. That would be enough for me.

A MOMENT OF SILENCE, BEFORE I START THIS POEM

By EMMANUEL ORTIZ

Before I start this poem, I’d like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon last September 11th.
I would also like to ask you
To offer up a moment of silence
For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,
disappeared, tortured, raped, or

killed in retaliation for those strikes,
For the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.And if I could just add one more thing…
A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the
hands of U.S.-backed Israeli
forces over decades of occupation.
Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of
malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S.
embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,
Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of
concrete, steel, earth and skin
And the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam – a people,
not a war – for those who
know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their
relatives’ bones buried in it, their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of
a secret war … ssssshhhhh….
Say nothing … we don’t want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
Whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have
piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.
An hour of silence for El Salvador …
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua …
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos …
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found
their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could
poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of
sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west…

100 years of silence…
For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half
of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand
Creek,
Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the
refrigerator of our consciousness …

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won’t be. Not like it always has
been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
And if this is a 9/11 poem, then:
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971.
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa,
1977.
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison,
New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and
Newsweek ignored.
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window
of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost.
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the
Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton’s 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all…Don’t cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing…For our dead.

EMMANUEL ORTIZ, 11 Sep 2002.

Unity: To A Color Or A Principle?!

Since treachery comes in every shade, who can I trust?

Well, what do I stand for? What vision do I have for myself, for my community, for the world around me?

One could ask: Do I have a community of people who SHARE my vision? Or am I a lone wolf?

I am a lone wolf. There is no black or other community to unite with. Haven’t found them yet at this late date and it doesn’t seem likely. The black folks I know – who love Obama, who vote, who want their piece of the rotting American pie – are not my tribe. And I know no others.

I am also not willing to unite with labels of any sort: liberals, progressives, libertarians. These people, like most others, are married to doctrine, narrow, limited, dead. The same holds for democratic and republican party apologists. They are blind and lazy and ignorant and not worth the time of day.

So the idea of uniting on the basis of skin or ethnicity or common land mass, on the basis of a shared history is false and ultimately, destructive. These are merely labels, but are not signs of life, or aliveness. While some of us have gone through similar or the same thing, our choices vary as much as our number. And on that alone, a unity cannot be built.

It is as limiting as the loyal democrat who refuses to see how torture under Obama is no different than the torture under Bush. The person who accepts an unconstitutional “kill list” in Obama’s hands, yet, kicked and screamed about Bush’s illegal activities, is a hypocrite of the first order. Blinders of any kind won’t do; in fact, they are deadly.

The person of a darker, colonized hue, is no more likely to be on the same page with me, as the neo-Nazi, fascist. Though they have dissimilar views, they cannot see their common humanity nor the common enemy.

I have no solution, other than, it ain’t about color when it really comes down to it. Its about the power of an idea that transcends. Duke Ellington called certain music “beyond category.” And the truth is certainly that. Too much of humanity and too much of truth are murdered by category, stunted by category.

Though so passe in this world, listening, reading, opening, learning is vital food. And this meal can only absorbed by being free of and from labels and shoeboxes that block the stomach, the mind, the spirit. This inner freedom is the only way to truly assimilate information. The more open I am, the more I hear. The more I take in.

The same ole dried up, dualistic rhetoric that passes for conversation or debate is wonder bread.

So, I seek the truth that I don’t have, the vision that is in accord with the reality that I can barely see, but feel. And if someone along the way shares that vision, that feeling, so be it. Maybe we can collaborate, maybe not. The goal is not to unify, but to live as much as possible in truth and follow it where it takes me.

 

“Say Good Night to the Bad Guy!”

A comment from Amenta:

Osama Bin Laden was both a hero (to some) and, well , lunatic is not the word I would use, but he was, to some, evil incarnate. It depends on what side one chooses.
I came to this understanding about who or what was evil in certain circimstances by reading the bible. I often read the stories of the great god of Abraham delivering lands into the hands of the Israelites, by them, the Israelites “utterly” destroying the people. Killing not only the soldiers, but disabled men, the women, children and even the animals, leaving no one alive and taking only the silver and the gold.

Let’s say this was the attack on the Amalakites. Well, surely, any Amalakites that escaped or evaded the death and destruction of the Isralites knew with out a doubt, with great assurity, that the great god of Abraham, of the Isralites, was an evil and wicked being. Period. And, withour a doubt the Israelites knew their god was the greatest of of all the universe.

Similarly, of us in the U.S have studied and seen the evidence of just how far the U.S. government has gone and will go. Or at least entities within and without the government. Remember this is the only nation that has ever used a nuclear weapon against another nation. But, prior to that they destroyed many other lives while testing the limits of the weapon on the Marshall Islands, Bikini Island and many others. This is kept quiet.

The United States funded and backed many of the German industries during WWII, that was killing Jews and Africans in the Sudetenland. In fact Paul Warburg’s brother Max Warburg was a high ranking officer in the Wehrmacht during WWII. Max kept financing for banks backed by Paul Warburg, J.P. Morgan and others, running. And the Allies had specific orders never to bomb these banks or trains carrying money and gold. This is a conspiracy, but not a theory. It’s a fact.

During the time of Martin, Malcolm (El Hajj Malik Shabazz), and the Black Panther Party, the FBI and other entities would release fictional news articles for publication into the mainstream press disparaging these people or groups. This is not a theory, though it was a conspiracy. A conspiracy to undermine the authority Martin, Malcolm and the BPP may have garnered.

The release of false news articles by the government (FBI, local police, NSA, CIA…) has been verified and documented from the 1960′s and 1970′s under C.O.I.N.T.E.L.P.R.O. Are we now to believe these types of activities by the government have stopped? No one knew of these activities when they were taking place. In fact, know one would have believed it were true if they were made aware of them.

Because we know the government has conducted such business in the past, we should be wary as to their “news” releases. Today’s techonology allows for a much more comprehsive way of distorting or even creating events. Sadly, all too often, when someone calls out the fact that all of this could be a technological play for the world, the words conspiracy theory comes forth as if to say “C’mon you’re reaching.”

“Guys let’s write history by thinking instead of letting history unveil our fallacy.Thanks. Try to at least think a little bit.”

Then to think would be to consider the unthinkable. To think would be to consider the history of what this country has done in this sphere. To think would be to consider that all that glitters is not gold.

Peace my people.

“Piece for my Peace”

Amenta, this is why I’m pretty much done here. When I see our people, here, using the same loaded language of the colonizer/imperialist/globalizing monster – to make us NOT think – the man’s work is done. But, to use a word from recovery lingo, its the “easier, softer way.” And I understand that.

Its easier, when you have made an external authority your internal authority – to defer, to bend, to place or rate above you – something outside of yourself.  It makes it that much easier to swallow what other external authorities say. Answers come easier – when they are furnished, rather than worked for, be they from wise deities, or big governments and their media chihuahuas, who, of course, print all the truth and nothin’ but. 

When you respectfully maintain, nourish your own internal authority (instincts, emotion, intuition, intellect) – while  maintaining an openness to ALL of what’s out there – then you might have a chance. But it ain’t easy, or soft. And there is a chance of choosing the wrong path or source, chance of losing your way. But I’d rather that, than buy someone else’s moldy bread just because its warm, old and comforting.

I am skeptical of anything put out by governments. “All governments lie,” so said I.F. Stone, and they do so because they are not for the people, but the cabal behind the curtain. That’s a fact that I have learned from living and studying history. Carefully. And for a very long time.  Information has been “colonized,” just as surely as countries have been.  So the info you receive turns out to be ANOTHER lie. That is why, when one needs their OWN antennae, along with the ability to think, critique, feel and see straight – they’d better have one.

Those of us who are in the process of learning some “deep” history that is beneath the lies of the conquerors, have to work our asses off. I don’t create or fabricate theories out of thin air. That’s not my thang. But I am aware that people in power don’t like to be questioned, particularly when they commit (war) criminal acts, treasonous acts. Any critique of such people, any questions that spring from the reality of their behavior are met with derision, character assassination – and sometimes REAL assassination.  Some of us know this; that some of us don’t ensures our continued marginalization.

Conspiracy theory is used pejoratively and on purpose  – by many – to silence, to close and cut-off discussions that might lead to truth, rather than more lies.  Its like “red baiting.” As soon as someone called you a communist back in the day, you could kiss your reputation – and career – goodbye.  And that was the intent.

Now, are there crazy-ass conspiracy theories out there? Of course there are! And some of those are put out there as “disinformation” Co-Intelpro-style, to keep people confused and ignorant, too.

Anyway, I’m wide open and maybe that’s my problem, but its mine and I’ll take it. To quote a particular disco band: “I love you, I love you all, but I have got to go!”

Peace to all of you. From the Bad Guy.

The Freeslave

SA, We Cannot Say We Are Free, by AYANDA KOTA

SA, we cannot say we are free

AYANDA KOTA: POVERTY  May 06 2011

On April 27 1994 the people of this country stood in long queues for many hours, waiting to cast their vote for the first time. In some parts of the country the weather was hostile, freezing cold, while in other parts it was scorching hot.

Our people were voting for the first time, voting for an end to racism and for democracy and a better life — for jobs, free education and decent housing. Over and above their vote for their material needs to be met, they were voting for their freedom. Or so they were made to believe.

The rays of that sunrise were breaking through the dark storm clouds. The first beams of the new sun were making their way through the clouds into the new blue sky. After centuries of oppression, hope was rekindled; a new nation, a rainbow nation, was born. Or so we were made to believe.

I remember watching the proceedings on television. I saw Archbishop Desmond Tutu casting his vote. The great man jumped for joy and said: “Free at last! Free at last!” Freedom is the ability of the people not to be oppressed and to be able to determine their own future collectively and by their own wills. Freedom is the realisation of the will of the people. When there is freedom, the government is for the people and by the people, because the people govern themselves. Freedom is the ability of the people to determine their own destiny. Freedom is self-government.

When there is freedom the people do not have to beg the government to recognise them as important. When there is freedom, people are free from hunger, poverty, disease, homelessness and the inability to meet basic needs. Justice, peace, dignity and access to the country’s wealth are central to freedom.

Freedom means that people must come first. It means people before profit. It means people before the big transnational corporations. It means that the people’s sovereignty and rights have been restored.

Freedom does not mean that the people vote for a few politicians to take their friends and relatives and join the old white capitalists as they feast off the devastation of the people behind high walls. Freedom does not mean police officers who shoot and kill us. Freedom does not mean that our so-called leaders become managers of capital, running the country and disciplining the people on behalf of capital.

Freedom does not mean that politicians become little gods. Freedom is not the rule of experts in civil society. Freedom is not the rule of the police. In a free country it is the voice of the citizens that matters the most. If South Africa were free, the voice of every South African and of every community would matter equally. Until everyone’s voice counts equally, we cannot say that we are free.

Against the nightmare
After 17 years of democracy, our townships are broken. All you see are drunk men and women walking aimlessly like zombies, their bloodstreams flowing with cheap alcohol. This is how we drug ourselves against the nightmare of a democracy that is really neo-apartheid and not post-apartheid. This is how we drug ourselves against a society that has no respect for us, no place for us and no future for us.

In the Eastern Cape they drink umtshovalale. In KwaZulu-Natal they drink isiqatha. In Gauteng they drink gavani. In the Western Cape they drink spirits. This alcohol has a hazardous effect. My people, young and old, have been silently taken to their graves because of the effects of alcohol. We are poisoning ourselves to drug ourselves against the horror of our lives. Throughout South Africa, young people smoke antiretroviral drugs. It is a well-known thing. We live below the poverty line and we have completely lost hope.

South Africa is the most unequal country in the world. The gap between the rich and the poor is vast — and it is growing. The unemployment rate is high, above 40%. Poverty rates are skyrocketing. In a place such as Alice in the Eastern Cape, residents drink unsafe water. At times there is no water at all. In Grahamstown we continue to use the bucket system to shit.

All around South Africa there are crumbling RDP houses and municipalities are falling under the strain of corruption, while Jacob Zuma’s family — his wives, children and relatives — are becoming billionaires. Sicelo Shiceka spent R640 000 in one year on rooms for himself and his staff at the One&Only hotel in Cape Town, flew to Switzerland first-class to visit an ex-girlfriend in jail and hired a limousine to drive him to the prison.

What kind of politician lives like this while the people are suffering as we are? What kind of politician lives like this while South Africa has become “the protest capital of the world”, with one of the highest rates of public protest in the world?

Shiceka is a predator and not a liberator. He is not the only one. In 2010 Eskom announced its decision to increase electricity tariffs by 35%, assaulting the unemployed and the poor while the ANC company, Chancellor House, rips the profit from the shaking hands of the people. Very soon the coffers of this country will run dry and we will be asked to give even more to the ANC, to Chancellor House and the Zuma family. The way they are looting our resources is beyond imagination. The way that they have privatised the struggle of the people is incredible.

We are a bleeding nation. All the power that belongs to us has been centralised in the control of the ruling elite. We are not consulted on the model of the RDP house that must be built. They decide for us. The Integrated Development Plan (IDP) meetings are a platform to manage us. There is no veracity. They choose those who must represent us in local chambers and then parade them as our leaders. When we ask to speak to these leaders, they call the police. We have no power. We have no voice. We have no freedom to celebrate. We live in a radically unjust society. We are oppressed.

The ANC tries to control the people with its police, social grants and rallies with celebrities and musicians. The ANC tries to drug us against their betrayal by keeping us drunk on memories of the struggle — the same struggle that they have betrayed. But everywhere the ANC is losing control. Protest is spreading everywhere. Everywhere people are boycotting elections and running independent candidates. Everywhere people are organising themselves into their own autonomous groups and movements.

As Mostafa Omara wrote about the Egyptian revolution: “People in Egypt will tell you: ‘Gone are the days when we felt helpless and little; gone are the days when the police could humiliate us and torture us; gone are the times when the rich and the businessmen thought they could run the country as if it were their own private company.'”

In South Africa we long for the same feeling. But revolutions do not spring from nothing. Revolutions come through the united action of men and women, rural and urban — action that springs from their needs. Revolutions happen when ordinary men and women begin to take action to seize control of their own lives.

The rebellion of the poor in this country is growing. More and more organisations are emerging. More and more people have become radicalised. More and more communities have lost their illusions after experiencing the violence of the predator state. More and more people are starting and joining discussions about the way forward for the struggle to take the country back.

We need to move forward with more determination, working all the time to build and to unite our struggles. As we connect our struggles, from Ficksburg to Grahamstown, from Cape Town to Johannesburg and Durban, we are, slowly but steadily, building a new mass movement. We are building a network of struggles in living solidarity with one another.

Ayanda Kota is the chair of the Unemployed People’s Movement in Grahamstown

Black Is White, Day Is Night

Bin Laden:   AUTHENTIC INTERVIEW

Swiss scientists 95% sure that Bin Laden recording was fake

Cheney’s Plan: Nuke Iran (Great take on US media)

A witness to Bin Laden’s ‘death’ says it’s bullshit

“Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in the newspaper.”

George Orwell

“There is no such thing, at this stage of the world’s history in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dare write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my papers, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”

John Swinton

Chief Editorial Writer,

New York Times,

1860-1870

Dead Men Tell No Tales

“Vote for me cuz I set him free!” So said one President Barack “Leave No Microphone Behind” Hussein Obama in his rush to personally announce the alleged execution of the alleged-terrorist, the alleged-Osama Bin Laden. His code name: “Geronimo.” Kinda racist, no?!

I mean, Geronimo hid in a cave, too, but he was trying to kick the colonial whites’ azz – and out of HIS country. On second thought, maybe the parallel, unintended, makes sense.

I guess O can kiss the Native American vote goodbye in 2012.

Americans rejoiced at the news, gathering at iconic landmarks – the White House, the “Freedom Tower” – cheering the extra-judicial killings of who knows how many people.

Reports from several sources, years ago, indicated that Bin Laden had died of renal failure. That this information never made it into the mainstream makes one wonder: why the quick disposal of the body? Which Bin Laden was this? Where’s the evidence?

Of course, dead men tell no tales. Nor provide receipts, faxes, or phone records.

Speaking of evidence, what happened to innocent until PROVEN guilty? And if Bin Laden was guilty of 9/11, who let it happen on purpose?! Who were his co-conspirators in the White House, in the FAA, Pentagon, because there is NO WAY it happened without help from deeply entrenched sources on the inside.

Here’s a sampling of other perspectives:

Farzana Versey “This business about death is not about Osama at all. It is about Barack Obama and his need to prove himself in times of recession and his own identity. His televised pronouncements and other statements clearly reveal that he is running an election: “Tonight, I can report to the people of the United States and the world, the United States had carried an operation that has killed Osama Bin Laden, a terrorist responsible for killing thousands of innocent people. Today, at my direction, the United States carried out that operation… they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body. The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date against al-Qaeda.”

No. One man’s death is not an achievement. He was a phantom figure, and the US has been fighting demons of straw. Is it even necessary to reiterate the historical genesis of al Qaeda and the making of bin Laden and CIA’s role in it? While the Saddam-Gaddafi prototypes, dictatorial within their shores, put up a fight against the US, Osama was beyond boundaries. He had no homeland and represented no nationality. He became as anti-Saudi as he was anti-American…”

Peter Martin and Alexander Lantier “Obama’s statement left critical questions unanswered and raised a host of new ones. First, Obama stated that “shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against Al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle and defeat his network.”In other words, Obama implied, without offering an explanation, that between 2001 and his inauguration in January 2009, the capture or killing of bin Laden had not been the major priority of the “war on terror.”

Second, the location of bin Laden’s killing is highly significant. Obama stated that US intelligence “had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan.” Obama then identified the location more precisely as Abbottabad. He did not explain that this town is located approximately 40 miles from Rawalpindi, the center of the Pakistani military establishment and only a few miles further from Islamabad, the country’s capital. This is the equivalent of a fugitive hiding next to a police station…”

Reuters: U.S. team’s mission was to kill bin Laden, not capture

“(Reuters) – The U.S. special forces team that hunted down Osama bin Laden was under orders to kill the al Qaeda mastermind, not capture him, a U.S. national security official told Reuters.

“This was a kill operation,” the official said, making clear there was no desire to try to capture bin Laden alive in Pakistan.”

Allan Nairn: “One Killer Killing Another…Every day, the U.S., directly with its own forces, or indirectly through its proxy forces, its clients, is killing, at a minimum, dozens of people. I mean, just since Obama came in, in the one limited area of drone strikes in Pakistan, something like 1,900 have been killed just under Obama. And that started decades before 9/11. We have to stop these people, these powerful people like Obama, like Bush, like those who run the Pentagon, and who think it’s OK to take civilian life. And it doesn’t seem that they can be stopped by normal, routine politics, because under the American system, as in most other systems, people don’t even know this is happening. People know the face of bin Laden. They know the evil deeds that he’s done. They see that he is dead, and they say, “Oh, great, we killed bin Laden.” But they don’t see the other 20, 30, 50, 100 people who the U.S. killed that day, many of them children, many of them civilians. If they did, they probably wouldn’t be out in the street cheering about those deaths.”

A Haitian History Lesson, Or, Why I LOVE Randall Robinson!

I am reading Randall Robinson’s “Quitting America.” I’ve quit America, too, I just haven’t left this jive plantation yet. Its comin’!!

Robinson is my new/old hero. I needed to share this brilliant, powerful black man with ya’ll. Its old history – if you’ve heard it at all – but its relevant.

I love Toussaint! I love Randall Robinson!! I love Haiti!!!