“DC a Sign of Our Nation’s Times” by Lisa Fritsch

Op-ed submission by Project 21 

Our nation’s capital exemplifies what America can become, but not in a good way.

Results from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey finds abysmally high percentages of single-parent households in underprivileged neighborhoods.

As the District of Columbia is a special federal enclave under congressional control, it presents a perfect opportunity for the newly-elected conservative majority in the U.S. House of Representatives to provide leadership.

According to the government data, 74 percent of households east of the Anacostia River — among the poorest in Washington — have only one parent. Only nine percent of those are headed by men. In similar neighborhoods in the rest of southeast and in northeast D.C., single-parent households are in the majority.

Some might read this, shrug their shoulders and skip to the next headline. Besides, it’s largely seen as a Hispanic and African-American problem. But these children, in danger of repeating the cycle of illegitimacy, affect everyone’s quality of life.

Out-of-wedlock childbirths in the black community may approach 72 percent, but it’s not just a black problem. According to a 2009 report from the Centers for Disease Control, the birth rate for unwed mothers rose 80 percent overall since 1980. The rate among white unwed mothers rose 14 percent between 2002 and 2006, while only nine percent among blacks. Hispanics topped the charts at 106 unwed births per 1,000 unwed women in 2006. Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution notes the traditional family values commonly attributed to Hispanics deteriorate among American-born generations.

Is America headed to a place where the two-parent family is an abnormality? Will the “family” itself become a relic like westerns and black-and-white television?

There’s already a dubious definition of what it means to be a mother, father, grandmother or grandfather that considers many as only “caretakers” and “guardians”. A mother, however, is not just a noun. Fatherhood has carried with it reverence and esteem. But fatherhood is now fading into oblivion along with the household role of the male.

Frighteningly, and with frivolous abandon, the term “baby daddy” and “baby momma” are no longer a childish vernacular reserved for the likes of “Saturday Night Live.” They are becoming a colloquial description of a child’s inception and ancestry.

Single-parent households can also cause gender and role confusion. Already, distinguishing the differences and uniqueness of being a man and being a woman is fading. Diluted gender qualities have manifested into an apathetic culture concerning the need for family.

When men feel less need to be a patriarch and women are more ambivalent about marriage and commitment, children grow up with a corrupted identity of themselves.

Worse than growing up in poverty, hard times or struggle is to awaken to an unknown self in which one is uncertain of his or her responsibilities and removed from the notion of family. Many children born into single-parent communities are already at this point.

The new chairman of the Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service and District of Columbia inherits enormous crisis and potential. The profound power Congress wields over D.C. affairs provides an opportunity to address the disintegrating American family through the introduction of programs that promote active roles for fathers and assistance programs that nurture togetherness rather than reward dissolution and disparity.

Let D.C. transform from the epitome of the problem to the example of how to fix the American family.

To take a line from the political left, children are a choice. They are not a requirement of a relationship. The choice to have a child carries important implications not just for the child but for the parents and society at-large.

Each time a child is born, it is an opportunity to shape morality, values and tell a story about who we love and who we are. In giving life, we are extending ourselves into future existence and leaving behind an example of the meaning and the beauty of life.

Building a family is a gift from two people towards life and humanity. In deciding that only half or less of that equation is needed to shape one, we are unequivocally phasing out the true meaning of love and life, man and woman.

Lisa Fritsch is a member of the national advisory council for the Project 21 black leadership network and a writer and radio talk show host in Austin, Texas.

“Beck, MLK Both Spoke About Freedom” by Jimmie L. Hollis

 

Commentary submission by Project 21

On August 28, I arrived in Washington, D.C. with a contingent of the Greenwich Tea Party Patriots of South Jersey to attend Glenn Beck’s “Restore Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial. We consisted of three packed busloads.

The weather was perfect that day, and I estimate there were between 200,000 and 300,000 people at the rally. Richard Hoch, a radio and television personality from my hometown Millville, New Jersey who came along with us, said he thought that number was actually higher.

Whatever the number, there were Americans of all races and ages there.  Real diversity.

As the rally began, the joyous mood of the crowd escalated. Glenn Beck’s guest speakers were chosen not for politics, but because of their patriotism and desire to make a difference. Critics said Beck was being politically correct because of the diversity of his guests, but “PC” had nothing to do with it. His choices for speakers were people who believed in America, and their messages were perfect for the theme of the rally.

Everyone gave inspiring speeches on the importance of restoring honor to our nation. Yet there were four notable moments when thunderous applause rippled through the crowd like a tidal wave:

•    Beck’s initial appearance on the stage.

•    When Sarah Palin was introduced.

•    When Dr. Alveda King, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was
      introduced.

•    When a clip of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was played.

I was a young man in my 20s when Dr. King was at the height of his struggle. I know many of his speeches well, including his most-famous “I Have a Dream” speech given 47 years ago to the day and in the same place as the Beck event. I was honored enough to be able to hear that speech in person while on leave from the U.S. Air Force.

I believe that, if he were alive today, Dr. King would have been pleased at the Americans of all races who came to the recent Beck rally. Despite the comments of Beck’s detractors, I think Dr. King would have joined hands with Beck —along with his niece, Alveda — to proclaim, “Let freedom ring!”

I also think Dr. King would have told those who have, since his death, distorted and twisted his message that they should stop the divisive rhetoric and bitterness and join with the patriots of this great nation to help restore its honor.

Some of Beck’s critics say that Dr. King would not have liked a constitutionally-limited government. They claim Dr. King wanted big government to protect the rights of blacks and the poor. Instead, I believe he wanted the government to ensure the constitutional rights of all people without discrimination or prejudice. But I don’t think he wanted that same government to re-enslave minorities and the poor (as well as the rest of America) through oppressive taxation and the suppression of self-dignity with over-reaching regulations and nanny-state policies.

At no time, but the way, did I personally witness or hear of any contention, strife, confrontation or negative incidents before, during or after the rally. Quite to the contrary, it was a very civil affair.

As we left the rally, my contingent of New Jersey tea partieres left feeling uplifted and filled with hope. We can now answer Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, who once warned, “We have given you a Republic, if you can keep it,” by saying with deep determination, “Ben, we are resolved to keep it.”

Jimmie L. Hollis is a member of the National Advisory Council of the Project 21 black leadership network.

The decade to come…

And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. Matthew 24: 6-8 

In no way do I consider myself a pessimist about the future. I am a pragmatic optimist, for I know in whom my hope lies. However as I look at the current local, national and international events today, I am going to take the liberty to make certain prediction about the decade the come.

Now I don’t consider myself a wannabe Nostradamus, nor do I claim to have any special ability to the see into the future, nor are these predictions based on any interpretations of biblical prophesies. I believe that anyone with a high school knowledge of world history and isn’t blind to recurring trends in history (which always repeats itself), who follows current events and employs a little common sense (which isn’t as common as the term implies), could make similar predictions. Nevertheless, here goes:

1. The U.S. will broker an agreement with certain elements of the Taliban whom they will declare as “moderates”, claim victory and get the hell out of Afghanistan… after losing hundreds, even thousands of troops with nothing to show for their sacrifice.    

 

2. There will be an ever new scramble for Africa, as the U.S. will manufacture reasons to increase military incursions within the continent via AFRICOM, in an effort to secure valuable minerals and oil reserves as well as blunt China’s growing influence. England and France, via the European Union will also attempt to re-establish their influence in some of their former colonies.

                                                                                                                               3. Black males, Muslim or not, will more and more be portrayed as a threat to national and international security. They will be accused of being religious, political, social and economic terrorists. This will lead to more frequent, stringent and intrusive profiling and harassment, which will result in an increase in detention, incarceration and extermination of Black males for “security” reasons.

                                                                                                  

4. The Obama administration will lobby for and get from the Democratic Congress another stimulus package worth billions for the financial and business community and claim it’s required for job creation. This will secure his second term as president. After 2016, he will be voted in as the Secretary General of the United Nations.

                                                                                                                             5. Sarah “Rouge” Palin will become the first woman and 45th President of the United States of America.

 

                                                                                                                                6. Iran will prepare to test a nuclear weapon with the assistance of Russia. Israel will then counter with a pre-emptive strike. The shit will then hit the fan!

7. After the death of Fidel Castro, the U.S. will attempt to regain control of Cuba and start a domino effect to turn back the tide of left wing populist regimes in Latin America, such as in Venezuela and Bolivia.

 

8. The Chinese economy will collapse under the crushing weight of the U.S. debt which it holds and will be exposed as the “paper tiger” which it truly is.

9. Speaking of tiger, Tiger Woods will break all of Jack Nicklaus’s records, regain all and even more sponsors, and become an even bigger merchandising phenom! He will also be arrested for having a loaded gun in his golf bag at the U.S. Open, release a rap albumn called “A Tiger’s Nightmare: Nigga$ in the Woods”, and will date one Black woman (kinda).

10. Al Davis will finally die and the Oakland Raiders will immediately win back to back Super Bowls!

Economist Peter Schiff on Jon Stewart

Thanks to Yvette over at Spatterblog where I saw this.

White Supremacy, Imperialism and Fascism in America

Breaking down the concentrated class struggle

Right now US society needs a clear understanding of the difference between socialism and fascism because a war is being waged against working class people. Americans fail to understand the class basis of the State. They also have a difficulty in making comparative analyses between the US brand of bourgeois democracy and other types. Imperialism and fascism are not such very different systems. US society presently faces a neo-fascist “dictatorship”.

First of all, socialism is a revolutionary social system. It is born out of revolt, uprisings and insurrection. It is a bottom up society and a system created to wither away; that is, socialism is not a society which has a long-term future. It will be transformed into a society where revolutions, uprisings and insurrections are unnecessary.

Socialism, like the society which must succeed it, will transform the means of distribution so that all the resources of society will be available to its members. The State must operate as the primary instrument for socialized distribution of resources — to contrast with capitalist privatization of collectively produced wealth — but not as the sole force for this activity.

Socialist democracy means working class democracy. This is the logic of democratic struggle. Once the laboring masses eradicate the degenerate notion of racist supremacy, the democratic political process must take on a more principled character. America thrives on the practice of racist supremacy, pure and simple.

Never has this been more apparent than the racist resurgence rising to challenge President Obama’s tenure in office. From Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio voicing his admiration for the Ku Klux Klan to the police summarily executing Oscar Grant on a BART station platform, these examples of racist reaction raising its hydra head have to meet forceful, unbreaking resistance from our community.

Racism shapes the culture of the colonizer society, and deforms the culture of the oppressed. It is, in reality, an expression of class warfare. As such, racism designates one nationality as a master race and the others as servants or slave races, a so-called underclass. These ideas, inculcated thru out colonialism, set the standards for interactions between workers of different nationalities. Workers from the white society think of themselves as superior to blacks, Latinos, American Indians, and Asians. Even government census forms convey a false sense of race purity.

The government bail out of the bloodsucking banks, tho, will deepen the merger of international finance capitalism with the State, which is the very definition of fascism. Capitalism is comprised of concentration of wealth into as few hands as possible. Imperialism constitutes capitalism’s merger of finance with the corporations to create an international finance system. So because of what is taking place today, with the State giving massive amounts of money to the Wall Street bankers, this is the end-game in the Milton Friedman economic model first advocated by Ronald Reagan, also known as voodoo economics.

Barack Obama seems to deepen this trend of reducing US white workers to colonized status, while the neo-cons continue to inflame racist sentiments. This struggle reflects the historical lag between bourgeois ideology and working class self-realization or, on the opposite hand, white workers reaction. Until that gap gets closed, the colonized masses must remain in a defensive posture against their white working class comrades on the other side of the skirmish line.

The State and Imperialism

What is going on with President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan? If we can take the word of economists like Paul Krugman and others, the government needs to wait out this period of “financial crisis” because it will stabilize over the next nine months or so. However, Obama continues to push for the so-called bank bail outs, which are nothing more than massive giveaways to the already filthy rich financial sector.

The US government want absolute authority. It seeks absolute authority under the cover of democracy to carry out the most inhuman agenda in history. It wants the ability to implement its agenda under the cover of law, based upon the assumption that elected lawmakers can pass legislation that supports the most extreme goals of international finance.

This is apparent from watching trends over the last thirty years. Over this period, leaders from Reagan on thru Obama have raped public assets to fill the pockets of international bankers and other corporate financiers. In the effort to strip down the State to its basic, fundamental character, US presidents have auctioned off, sold, or outright given the banks trillions of dollars. They have used the excuse that there is a banking crisis. Simultaneously, the banks line their pockets, the pockets of their investors, and buy up other financing assets.

If the bankers were operating honestly, the banks would never have sunk. It is because of their rapine greed and thirst for power that the banks have collapsed. It is not because credit has dried up, but because so much money has become concentrated in so few hands that this situation exists.

Anytime real wages have not kept pace with inflation, anytime the US worker labors for more hours than his counterpart in other industrial workers, anytime that worker has to go into debt to maintain a house, automobile and the simple thing in life, that is because cash has dried up on the street. It has dried up because the financiers have concentrated 80% of it in their own hands. Seven or eight percent of all people control 80% of all the money. Which means that the remaining 83% of the population must fight over the remaining dollars.

So while Obama has joked about bailing out the auto industry, he continues to push the argument that society cannot survive without the banks. But the auto industry produces a product. The banks do not. Paper money is not a product with any intrinsic value whatsoever.

Why is the State giving even more money to the banks, when the government owes the banks over $10 trillion? The State can seize the banks and liquidate the debt. That makes more sense.

That is what the State did with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It wanted to control the oil and the opium, so it invaded those countries. Seventy-five percent of Iraqi oil ends up on the black market; opium production has skyrocketed since the US occupation of Afghanistan. The dope ends up here. Profits from the blackmarket oil ends up in the hands of the CIA and the international financiers. These monies are used to destabilize governments and societies, including US society.

However, the State wants to strip away all the benefits US workers have provided for this society. The State wants to strip down Social Security, pensions, health care and transform this country into a backwater of reaction. It can only achieve this by supporting the banks. In doing so, the strategy has been to give away public sector assets from cash grants to public lands.

The international financiers control the most reactionary sector of capitalism. They fuel wars all over the globe. They finance wars, they finance coups d’etat, they finance assassinations of men like Salvador Allende and Maurice Bishop. They want to transform revolutionary Cuba into a whorehouse and a den of vice. They want the world for their playground while creating misery and instability for billions of people in every single country.

The United States is rapidly moving towards fascism. It is repeating all the steps and turns that Germany and Italia made in the years preceding World War II. The marginalized right-wing has become more shrill and obstructionist, and the Obama Administration appears like the Weimar Republic, granting concessions to the enemies of the people, international finance. If this trend continues, in four more years there will be a firestorm in this country. You kno where this leaves African people. People need to take to the streets today.  We do not have time to wait.

A World Wide Palenque

Race, Class and White Supremacy

“We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.” Pragmatic

The difficult aspect of figuring out this economic breakdown is breaking it down for the masses, yet maintaining a grip on what is happening so that can be simplified. Because I am not by training an economist nor an intellectual by any means. I am a working class brother, myself, and it is my commitment to translate the news and misinformation of the capitalist system into a form upon which people can ACT! I will do this until my dying breath, in the hope that you will SEIZE THE TIME, and put an end to Imperialism once and for all.

• I wasn’t even going to comment on the most recent parasitic “financial meltdown” garbage, AIG taking federal “bailout” money and paying huge bonuses to executive officers and upper managers. And yet folks still don’t seem to be moving rapidly enuf to build, since we have so little time left. Workers, and African ones in particular, do not have the luxury of allowing the bourgeoisie to sort matters out for society.

Because this is a system built upon the concentrated class system (the white Left has called the oppression of colonized nationalities “superexploitation”), we sometimes call it White Supremacy. Because of White Supremacy, it is important for Africans to understand these concepts in the coming struggle. Because we will have to fight and organize and fight some more so that scores can be settled by our side, and not on behalf of racist, neo-colonial Imperialism.

What I mean to state clearly and without any mistake in meaning is that White Supremacy is RACISM. White Supremacy concentrates the class question, resulting in what colonized people as we kno as RACISM, which the white Left and its black auxilliaries call “superexploitation”. Yet many Black Internationalists have soundly stated and demonstrated that super exploitation is normal exploitation in the colonial apparatus that sustains Imperialism.

White Supremacy permits white people to believe they can dilute all questions pertaining to racist (not “racial”) oppression by promoting NEO-COLONIALISM. And that does dilute most questions by giving the appearance of having solved the concentrated class question, racism. The dilution arises in the delay, or lag, it creates between the contradictions which arise at the point of production. Which is merely a fancy way of saying that the struggle between the (colonized) workers and the capitalists, which is the sharpest form of struggle, becomes derailed or delayed in a neo-colonialist regime.

• When we discuss the lag in the relations of production, we are talking the period between the capitalist class having its way until the workers themselves attain clear revolutionary consciousness. The colonized worker sees the contradictions more sharply; his/her relationship to production is more critical because the colonized worker is closer to being in a life and death struggle than the Imperialist worker.
  

• MATERIAL PRODUCTION means the production of whatever has a real economic value; production is the process that we engage in thru our work in the factories, mines, fields and other places where workers are required. If you sell your labor, that is, if your labor is what you use to make a living, then you belong to the working class. Even our ancestors, capitalist slaves, were workers. In fact, they set the standards for material production and labor organization upon which all capitalist production is modeled.

Yet this period is characterized by intensified, rapine CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH in as few hands as possible. There is no “financial meltdown” or economic crisis except as manipulated by the robber barons of the financial system. It is crass manipulation which will IMMOLATE us all if not for a mass uprising against the ruling class.

The critical thing to understand is that only working class people can change this situation. Working class people make up a strategic sector of the population. Only two strategic sectors exist, that is, only two classes can determine the objective course of history. The ruling class, a small group that wields power out of proportion to its numbers, has this ability. Workers, because of several factors, form the other class.

• We must discuss classes in terms of relationships. Their relationship to one another and, objectively — therefore primarily — their relationship to material production.

ONLY THE WORKER IS INVOLVED IN MATERIAL PRODUCTION.

• For this reason, the worker (by extension, meaning “the producing classes”) remains the only element, the only person, the only link in the class system without which society cannot survive! Other classes are hangers-on, or parasites.

Material production puts bread on the table, clothes on your back, a roof over the fam! YOU DO NOT NEED PAPER MONEY TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN!

• But we are getting ahead of ourselves. More explaining of class relationships is in order, first.

Other classes, particularly the petty bourgeoisie, or middle class, lack the ability to objectively alter the course of history. They lack power, wealth and numbers. For them to gain power, they must manipulate society’s actual producers, the workers, in order to displace the present rulers and wield power in their stead.

The ruling class does not need numerical strength to determine the course of history. They have power and wealth which allows them to call all the shots. Imagine how much wealth and power they have at their fingertips, power they use to control the entire planet, and they do not make up more than 1% of the entire world population. Perhaps their numbers are far less than that.

But all this wealth at their disposal allows them to control the economies of entire nations, INCLUDING THE GOOD OLE USA! That chess position reveals too much of an immense control ability for a handful of people in a vast interconnected world of five billion living souls.

• So as this power and wealth derives from concentrating resources into as few hands as possible, our current situation exists because society blindly accepts that ownership of PRIVATE PROPERTY is a right.

People must understand that rights are abstractions; rights exist based upon what society recognizes as moral or just or merely the way it is because the law says so. In a democracy, this abstraction cannot have any force if people strike against it. When society turns democracy upside down, people will begin to see that as the only way democracy can operate in their favor.

Once WE turn away from the notion of PRIVATE PROPERTY as a right, that will begin to erode the power which a tiny, bloodsucking minority wields over the vast coffers of collectively produced wealth.

As unemployment expands and people’s comfort zone shrinks, the outrage which remains bottled up must not stay contained as it had during the years when wages shrunk and living expenses grew. Because INTERNATIONAL FINANCE CAPITALISM must end. It is the system which has produced every problem known to the modern world. The vast interwoven social fabric which stretches across the globe cannot allow its fate to rely upon the decisions of a handful of jaded movers and shakers.

The working classes produce everything society needs for its maintenance. It produces medicine, food, housing, weapons, factories, mines, wealth and power that it has the ability to wield in its own interests by its own hands.

• However, it surrenders everything it produces for the pleasure of the ruling class. EVERYTHING!! The workers and other producers give up every iota of wealth and power to the capitalists, who turn it all against the workers who created this fabulous society themselves. EVERYTHING!

The bourgeoisie produce wars over resources to turn one group of workers against another, to enslave a nation so that the bourgeoisie may themselves enjoy the power they exercise thru the spectacle of bloodshed and horrendous destruction. The bourgeoisie produce nothing except exploitation and oppression. It is impossible for them to produce a single thing of material significance.

In fact, the bourgeoisie substitute paper value for real value.

They substitute worthless paper for the things that workers produce in the factories, mines, fields and anywhere else workers replenish and subdue the earth for the life of society.

SUBSTITUTING PAPER MONEY FOR COMMODITIES AND NECESSITIES OF REAL VALUE CONSTITUTES THE BIGGEST SWINDLE IN HISTORY!

Paper for the gold you dig and for the diamonds that get forked over; the farmer gives up his crops for a debt owed to the bank.

• ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY!! Has society gone mad?

Yes, this is the beginning of the madness which brought us to this point in history. We are in a new period, where society will have to decide which way to turn. Your very existence is on the line.

We who consider ourselves “Black” do so because of our relationship to White Supremacy. Our relationship to a racist society demanded we produce a SEPARATIST identity. As Steve Bantu Biko once stated, “Black Consciousness is a STATE of Mind.” It is not a skin color.

IT IS POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS.

It is revolutionary theory and action within the international African community. So on this basis, we have to decide if we seek to be the workers or the bosses, revolutionaries or reactionaries; can society do away with international finance?

Do we really want to get rid of the banks, the financiers and — most of all — the political system which tells us that the world’s highest standard of living exists right here in the good ole USA. Not many people want to challenge that, for any number of reasons.

YET the behemoth is really a bloodsucking excrescence, with its tentacles wrapped around the MINDS of five billion people! And that many folks cannot and will not ever taste one tenth of that lifestyle, since we would require FOUR EARTHS to sustain that much material production.

Build a New World by tearing down the old, or sort thru the ashes of a destroyed planet. The choice is yours.

true knowledge

“Neo-Fascism Waits in the Wings” by Iskandar Langalibalele

We are honored to have Iskandar Langalibalele as a guest contributor to the Afrospear. He blogs at Mbantunyankompong and Kilombo Republic.

The word for today, boys and girls, is NATIONALIZE! All thru out the news last week, economic pundits called on the government to NATIONALIZE THE BANKS! What does this mean? Leading economists of the capitalist system calling for nationalization can mean several things. But first, we need to define nationalization and society in the age of misinformation.

On February 19th, President Barack Obama made a speech in Arizona, which has the third highest foreclosure rate in the country. Obama wants to help banks restructure mortgages, and refinance some mortgage holders who owe banks for homes no longer worth what they paid. All this is part of his stimulus package.

However, that day’s news reported that the automakers continue to be in distress and Goodyear lays off workers because slow car sales means less tire manufacturing. The New York Stock Exchange closed down by 300 points. Economic activity is predicted to contract and unemployment is expected to rise. Most experts believe the recession will last at least 24 months if it doesn’t plunge into a depression.

Structural readjustment for the US economy can only lead towards financial disaster. The bloodsucking international banking system proved this in Africa, Asia and Latin America. When economists begin demanding the nationalization of banks, capitalism is in big trouble. Nationalization means a government takeover of a sector or the whole economy. This can happen under a socialist state, which we do not have, or it can happen in a state moving towards fascism, which we appear to have.