No one is every safe, as long as these forces remain in power. The shadow of death had seemed to pass from Mumia, and yet there it is, again. In a case crammed with injustice, in a system packed with raw racism, consideration is given at the highest level — not to Mumia’s freedom, but to his execution. Welcome to America, again. Now what are we going to do, together?
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday granted an appeal by prosecutors and set aside a ruling that invalidated the death sentence of black political activist Mumia Abu-Jamal for the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer.
His case has become a prominent cause for many death penalty opponents.
In a brief order, the Supreme Court sent the case back to a U.S. appeals court based in Philadelphia for further consideration in view of the high court’s recent decision in an Ohio case that had raised similar issues.
The Supreme Court in the Ohio case unanimously reinstated the death sentence of a neo-Nazi convicted of murdering three men. The court’s action, which was not a ruling on the merits of the case, could lead to Abu-Jamal’s death sentence being reinstated, too.
The appeals court had ruled that Abu-Jamal, 55, deserved a new sentencing hearing because of flawed jury instructions.
Abu-Jamal, a former member of the Black Panthers militant group, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1982 for murdering white Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in an early morning confrontation on December 9, 1981.
Somebody needs to give every middle class American a simple, working definition of Class Privilege. And how to USE it towards the good of the people. I mean, the BEST of these passengers chose to stay on board just to not feel queasy eating near mass graves? Hmmm… How about passengers pulling every extra bit of food off that ship and getting it past those guards?
I want to unite with Mars here — and then raise my own thoughts about HOW that can be done.
People traveling on a ship like this could have (and should have) said “WTF?” They could have organized themselves (or some more conscious section of the passengers) and demanded that the ship stop “business as usual” and that every way possible be found to help the people of Haiti — open the ship’s cabins to the wounded needing care, hand over ships stores to the people beyond the perimeter, move beds out to makeshift clinics and distribute supplies into the shantytowns etc. A ship like this has fuel, cooking facilities, food, cloth for tenting, forms of clorine that can purify water, and more.
And to accomplish this, not only would people need to break out of “business as usual” themselves — but they would have to break out of their role as “consumers,” they would need to realize that suffering is not some break in the TV entertainment (and something you “watch”), and they would even have had to override law, property and custom — making demands on the cruise line and the captain, sit-in to enforce their demands, use appropriate violence, seize materials and take them through the lines themselves, unite with the more conscious sections of the multinational crew, risk their own lives, etc.
Now, why do such things rarely happen spontaneously?
Secret “Jesus” Bible codes inscribed on American military weapons
ABC News reports that high-powered rifle sights provided to the US Army and Marines by Michigan weapons maker Trijicon include coded references to Bible passages about Jesus Christ:
The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.
U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious “Crusade” in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.
One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of the New Testament, which reads:
“For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
This piece first appeared on Counterpunch. It is two years old — but no less revealing, since for many people Haiti only jumped in existence last week when the media turned its eyes on an earthquake. (Thanks to Radical Eyes for suggesting it.)
U.S. Reporting on the Coup Haiti: How to Turn a Priest into a Cannibal
By DIANA BARAHONA
When Haiti’s wealthy elites removed President Jean Bertrand Aristide from office in a February 2004 coup, they had the help of the Bush administration, as well as that of the French and Canadian governments. But they also had help from the U.S. press, which helped publicize a carefully planned narrative to justify the overthrow.
I have always been interested in how a supposedly independent press so often manages to report on foreign affairs from the point of view of the State Department. What are the mechanisms by which the government’s narrative ends up being the frame for stories about U.S. military interventions and CIA-backed coups in the Americas? Who are the foreign correspondents and how do they learn the “correct” way to report on a given crisis? Journalist Michael Deibert reported as a special correspondent in Haiti during the crisis, contributing to or authoring 16 stories, which were first published in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and then in Newsday. I chose to look at the stories of just one foreign correspondent because together they provide a perfect example of framing techniques used by the press to create acquiescence towards the coup, or at least to confuse the public.
Dr. King was arrested during the 1956 Mongomery Bus Boycott. Twelve years later, after his assassination, someone scrawled a celebration of his death on this mugshot held by the Alabama police.
by Mike Ely Several years ago, on January 15, the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., I was in Memphis for the first time and went with friends and comrades to the Lorraine Motel after a commemorative march through town.
A long line of people stretched out of the building, now a museum to Dr. King and the historic struggle against Jim Crow segregation. It wound down the block and out into the parking lot — filled with families who had come together, groups of high school youth, and somber veterans of the civil rights days. The memories of loss, rage and hope from those days long ago, in 1968, are still vivid and passed on.
This article digs into the controversies and facts surrounding King’s assassination.
* * * * *
On April 24, 1998, 30 years after the killing of Dr. King, the accused assassin James Earl Ray died in a prison hospital in Nashville. The official story is that Ray was a loner who shot King in Memphis on April 4, 1968 and escaped out of the country. And after Ray’s death the national media insisted, once again, that there is “no evidence” of any high-level conspiracy. In fact, there are many reasons to believe that Dr. King was killed by an organized conspiracy and that powerful forces within the ruling class were involved.
James Earl Ray was a small-time, white racist, stickup man. In April 1968 he had been on the run for a year, after escaping from a Missouri penitentiary. Yet the authorities claim that Ray stalked King methodically from one city to another and arranged to have plastic surgery in Los Angeles. They expect people to believe that Ray simply shot King at the Lorraine Motel, and then climbed in his distinctive white Mustang and drove out of Memphis–even though King was under close federal surveillance. Ray traveled from Memphis to Atlanta, to Canada, to England, to Portugal, back to England and then was arrested on June 8 on his way to the white racist African state of Rhodesia–traveling with two false Canadian passports, registered under different names. And yet people are told this was done without accomplices, financial help or a larger organization.
Facts from Memphis
Gerald Posner recently wrote a book, Killing the Dream, intended to debunk “conspiracy theories” around King’s death. However, this book is useful because of what it can’t deny: According to Posner 12 or 14 government agents were packed into a firehouse on the day King was shot at the Lorraine Motel–less than 150 feet away from both King and the assassin. FBI agents and military intelligence agents were watching every move of King’s group, and were assisted by Black Memphis cops who could identify figures of the local Black community. Two Black firemen were transferred from that firehouse–so they could not alert King about these secret government activities.
When Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, Black people took to the streets of America lighting the skies with flames of rebellion and sorrow. There was at that time a revolutionary country that worked as a beacon for the oppressed: Revolutionary China, then in the high tides of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. One leader in the world spoke out clearly and boldly on the significance and bitterness of Kings murder… the communist leader Mao Zedong. Here is the text of that statement which circled the world.
Statement by Mao Zedong
Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China
In Support of the Afro-American Struggle Against Violent Repression
April 16, 1968
Some days ago, Martin Luther King, the Afro-American clergyman, was suddenly assassinated by the U.S. imperialists. Martin Luther King was an exponent of nonviolence. Nevertheless, the U.S. imperialists did not on that account show any tolerance toward him, but used counter-revolutionary violence and killed him in cold blood. This has taught the broad masses of the Black people in the United States a profound lesson. It has touched off a new storm in their struggle against violent repression sweeping well over a hundred cities in the United States, a storm such as has never taken place before in the history of that country. It shows that an extremely powerful revolutionary force is latent in the more than twenty million Black Americans.
Cruise ship docks at private beach in Haiti for barbeque and water sports
The Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines’ ship Independence of the Seas went ahead with its scheduled stop at a fenced-in private Haitian beach surrounded by armed guards, leaving its passengers to “cut loose” on the beach, just a few kilometers from one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the region’s history.
The ship’s owners justified it as a humanitarian call, because the ship also delivered 40 palettes of relief supplies while its passengers frolicked on zip-lines and ate barbeque within the 12-foot-high fence’s perimeter:
What explains the horror of Haiti? That mad dog Pat Robertson says it is a divine curse — punishment, he says, for making a “pact with the Devil” in order to overthrow slavery in the 1790s.
In the New York Times (January 15), columnist David Brooks rolled out a more sophisticated claim.
He claims that there is just something wrong with the poor. “Culturally.”
And (by implication) there is just something wrong with African people — who seem to be so consistently poor in Africa, in the Caribbean and in the U.S.
This is a theory that slinks around the edges of American racial politics — exerting great power from the shadows. Here, in Brooks column, that argument dares to come out into the open — like a bold rat scurrying across the floor.
The gathering at Bois Caiman where Haiti's revolution started
Haiti and the U.S. were always entwined — from their very origins in the 1700s. Slave revolution in the Caribbean caused the American settler-state to tremble as it expanded. Revolution in Haiti — then one of the most profitable colonies in the world — greatly weakened the French empire. It stirred the hearts of slaves throughout the Americas, leading to whispered plans of revolt. And it provided an opening to the slave owners of the U.S. to grab new lands all the way to the Mississippi river — first (on paper) from the French, and then (through bloody genocide) from the Indian peoples.
The following is from Consortium news and appears on Alternet.
Haiti’s Tragic History Is Entwined with the Story of America
By Robert Parry
Announcing emergency help for Haiti after a devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake, President Barack Obama noted America’s historic ties to the impoverished Caribbean nation, but few Americans understand how important Haiti’s contribution to U.S. history was.
In modern times, when Haiti does intrude on U.S. consciousness, it’s usually because of some natural disaster or a violent political upheaval, and the U.S. response is often paternalistic, if not tinged with a racist disdain for the country’s predominantly black population and its seemingly endless failure to escape cycles of crushing poverty.
We need to talk about Aristide — the Haitian political leader associated with the poor and with radical change.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the tragedy of this earthquake was that Haiti had been doing so well. What she referred to was an imperialist campaign (spearheaded by her husband Bill Clinton) to consolidate a conservative Haitian government and prepare the workforce for sweatshop investments.
A key part of that “improvement” was the crude, U.S. supported exclusion of left-leaning forces from the Haitian electoral process. In one remarkable interview, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti defended the exclusion of the Lavalas party saying simply that their participation would have frightened U.S. investors and denied Haiti what might be its last chance at economic investment. Rarely have I seen the mood and desires of specific capitalists so openly given as the reason for suppressing electoral democracy in the Third World. It was a crude argument (by a sitting U.S. ambassador) that political forces should be coldly suppressed if they are not acceptable to U.S. sweatshop investors.
This political history is almost missing from the current coverage of Haiti (which rarely discussed the seemingly-invisible and seemingly ignored Haitian government). The U.S. has stepped in as a pretty crudely colonialist power — shoving its own puppet government aside in the most patronizing and dismissive way… rolling its troops up to Haiti’s shores, preparing to do whatever it needs to “contain” the people of Haiti, and especially prevent any wave of people fleeing Haiti for Miami.
Here on Kasama, we need to discuss Aristide, Lavalas, and the sharp political questions facing Haiti’s people — including the roads toward the kind of radical revolution and social change that Haiti (and the Caribbean) so clearly need.
The following article from the Jamaica Observor touches on a number of these issues, and can help kick off that discussion.
No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain!
By John Maxwell
If you shared my pain you would not continue to make me suffer, to torture me, to deny me my dignity and my rights, especially my rights to self-determination and self-expression.
Six years ago you sent your Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to perform an action illegal under the laws of your country, my country and of the international community of nations.
It was an act so outrageous, so bestially vile and wicked that your journalists and news agencies, your diplomats and politicians to this day cannot bring themselves to truthfully describe or own up to the crime that was committed when US Ambassador James Foley, a career diplomat, arrived at the house of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide with a bunch of CIA thugs and US Marines to kidnap the president of Haiti and his wife.
The government of Yemen has stated unequivocally that it will accept no U.S. ground forces in the country, and that such deployment would only be counterproductive in the struggle against al-Qaeda and its local affiliate, Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
The U.S., warns Yemen’s Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi “should learn from its experiences in Pakistan and Afghanistan and not repeat the mistakes in Yemen, both in dealing with the government of Yemen and confronting al-Qaeda.” “Any intervention or direct action by the United States could strengthen the al-Qaeda network and not weaken it,” adds Deputy Prime Minister Rashed al-Aleemi.
The Minister of Religious Endowment and Islamic Guidance, Hamoud al-Hitar, declares, “Military action in Yemen, by either the US or any other country, will make all Yemeni people unite, ending their internal disputes to stand together against any direct military intervention.”
Our web address (URL) has changed. It was previously mikeely.wordpress.com
It is now kasamaproject.org
The reason for this change is obvious:
This site has never been a one-person blog. It has grown, over the last two years into an active political space sustained by a community — hundreds of participants, thousands of reader/lurkers and a team of moderators.
Our new domain name, kasamaproject.org, captures that better.
The old web address will continue work and existing links to this site will continue to work — at least for the foreseeable future.
Please use this new URL when sharing materials from Kasama.
On your own sites, please change links to reflect our new URL.
Last night’s American Idol audition by General Larry Platt is an instant viral-hit — in the white-bread mainstream of American culture. Platt half-raps his way through a rant against youth wearing their pants low. It isn’t really a song, more like an extended ring-tone. And not only did this delight the judges, and get mega-prime time publicity… but it is now echoing through the culture.
General Larry Platt apparently has a history as a community activist in Atlanta, and has now made his mission attacking the street fashions of black youth.
To put it bluntly: Old fools have always thought they were saving civilization by denouncing the youth. It is tired. It is wrong. It is disrespectful. And it is doubly disrespectful to aim this at Black youth — who are already target number one of murdering police, bigoted school authorities, snooty church gossips, marginalizing employers… and every other segment of class authority.
Is this world so small, so settled, so calm, that General Larry Platt has nothing better to denounce than the fashions of Black youth?
I don’t claim to judge fashion — certainly not the fashion of teenagers (who can adopt and reject as they choose).
But let’s not be naive about what Platt’s 15-minutes of fame represent: If you aren’t succeeding (so the message goes) its your own fault — for defying authority, for cultivating a “marginalizing” Black youth culture, for not caring enough, for not tucking your underwear away. If you are uncomfortable with the attitude and demeanor of Black youth (so the message goes) you don’t need to feel like a closet racist, you are not alone, and you are justified.
Should we really accept that? Should we let that pass? Really?
Is that why Black kids are discarded and shot down? Cuz their underwear is showing? That’s why so many have no education, Because they act like fools?
There are many things that Black youth need to know — today consciousness is not high, and all kinds of bullshit reigns.
But General Larry Platt has done the Stepin Fetchit routine of the year — to the delight of grinning media mummies. If you think that is funny…. then you inhabit a very very different world.
No one is every safe, as long as these forces remain in power. The shadow of death had seemed to pass from Mumia, and yet there it is, again. In a case crammed with injustice, in a system packed with raw racism, consideration is given at the highest level — not to Mumia’s freedom, but to his execution. Welcome to America, again. Now what are we going to do, together?
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