Obama

Obama Must Give General Amnesty to all Prisoners


There has been a long call to free all prisoners unjustly held in American prisons and jails. Ninety per cent were mind altered at the time of their arrest, at least 50% were likely dual diagnosed, i.e., suffer drug abuse and mental illness. The majority are in for petty crimes and if they'd had proper legal representation would serve little or no time at all.

Not only are their crimes petty but should be seen as economic crimes due to poverty and lack of opportunity in a system that is advancing to what must be called neo-feudalism or wage slavery with little permanent employment, no health insurance, no unionism, thus they work at the whim of bosses who earn mega salaries and generous bonuses.

Once incarcerated, they suffer sexual and physical abuse, otherwise known as torture of the worse kind, and this includes inmates of mental wards, juvenile homes, jails and prisons. Those prisoners of conscious are often the most isolated for fear they will infect the population with radical ideology. The death row inmates are usually black and poor again, again, would not be on death row with proper legal representation.

The economic and social cost is astronomical, between fifty and sixty thousand dollars per inmate per year, more than it would cost to send them to Harvard, Yale and Stanford. But incarceration is big business in the era of de-industrialisation or the withering world of work, especially jobs with a living wage. Yet these neo-slaves, i.e., under the US Constitution involuntary servitude is legal, are a valuable commodity in the economic order. Prisons and jails are big business, in many communities the only business. They are now privatized and part of the military/corporate/university complex of institutions that perpetuate the capitalist system of free market exploitation. The incarcerated are of such value that the most powerful union in the state of California is the Correctional Officers Union that obviously has a vital stake in keeping the prison population high so they can maintain their lifestyle of conspicuous consumption. The Union will fight to the death to prevent a general amnesty.

In cahoots with the correctional officers are police departments who must arrest a quota of persons to maintain their jobs and justify their budgets. In some cities the police departments consume the major portion of city funds, to the neglect of schools, libraries and employment projects that would decrease arrests, court costs and incarceration. Many times the police are guilty of planting false evidence, false arrests, engaging in prostitution, drug dealing and money laundering. This behavior by law enforcement is a common feature below the border in Mexico, but is rapidly becoming a feature across the border in the US.

In some cases the police are in conspiracy with developers to destabilize neighborhoods that soon fall to gentrification. All the above applies to Oakland, California. It is a community under siege by police and gangs connected with the police. We suspect half the black on black homicide is police conspired.

A general amnesty must become a top priority of communities, especially with so many men falling victim to the slave catching police. This leads to family disintegration by increasing single family households. It is causing personality deformations in boys and girls who suffer prolong identity crisis since they lack positive male models. A young man attending a drug recovery meeting said, "Man, you might think some of my friends are gay, but they ain't gay, they just never heard a man's voice!"

We must reclaim are people from the dungeons , hellholes and Gulags in America. We cannot continue allowing them to be commodities in the capitalist system, similar to pork, corn, wheat and oil, to be traded on the stock exchange as neo-slaves.

If the last act of Saddam Hussein was a general amnesty, surely President Obama can do the same. It may get him some much needed brownie points for his 2012 election bid. But he must do so because it is the right thing to do. To not do so is economically and socially unsustainable.
--Marvin X
1/4/11

Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow

There are more African Americans under correctional control today--in prison or jail, on probation or parole--than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas, like Chicago, have been labeled felons for life. These men are part of a growing undercaste, not class, caste--a group of people who are permanently relegated, by law, to an inferior second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits--much as their grandparents and great-grandparents once were during the Jim Crow era.--Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

Congress to Palestinians: Drop dead - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Congress to Palestinians: Drop dead - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Harlem Discussion on Manning's Malcolm X Book

Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Black Revolutionary
A Critical Discussion of the New Biography-Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
SCHOMBURG CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN BLACK CULTURE /

MALCOLM X BLVD + 135TH STREET

Video link:*http://politube.org/show/3222**

This is a video of a panel organized by the Malcolm X Museum Chair: Sam Anderson*

PANELISTS INCLUDE...

Abdullah Abdur Razzaq Personal Secretary to Malcolm X.

Rosemari Mealy- Author-Activist, /Memories of a Meeting: Fidel and Malcolm X..

Bill Sales- Author-Activist, /From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the //Organization of Afro American Unity.

Kevin Powell- Public Speaker, and author or editor of 10 books, including /Open Letters to//America and /The Black Male Handbook.

William Strickland- Educator-Activist-Author, /Malcolm X: Make It Plain

Amina Baraka- Poet, Songstress and Activist

Amiri Baraka- Revolutionary Poet, Author and Jazz Composer

Zionism and National Insanity

Zionism And National Insanity

"Marvin X at his best, clarity of perception!" --Gerald Ali, UK

Recent events in Israel such as the planned building of 1,600 housing units in Arab East Jerusalem, lead us to the conclusion the Zionists are headed down a national suicide path that will surely take America, if not the world, with them. What makes their suicide a foregone conclusion is the fact they are surrounded by nations with populations more suicidal than they.

The Saudi Arabian brand of Islam promoted by Al Quida is a return to Ya'um Jahiliyah or the days of ignorance before the advent of Islam in 632 AD. The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah are just as determined as the Jewish Zionists to execute their fanatical, dogmatic vision in the world, or in particular, the Middle East.

It is a dance of death for all peoples, with no hope in sight. The more the Muslims seem ready to conclude a deal with for some semblance of a Palestinian state, the more the Zionists expand their colonial occupation of Arab land.

Despite the winds of revolution and cries for social-political and economic justice throughout the region, the Zionists in Israel are tone deaf and determined to continue down the road to hell, for where else can they go as the Arab masses move toward a unity never before seen.

The recent visit of Israeli leader Netanyahu was a supreme example of hubris or simple minded White supremacy arrogance. He openly and unashamedly defied President Obama's call for a return to the pre-1967 borders in a final peace deal with the Palestinians. Despite having the greatest army in the world and nuclear weapons, Netanyahu claimed the 1967 borders are indefensible. How is this possible with an annual three billion dollar defense welfare check from America? And the Israeli sycophants in the US Congress treated the Zionist leader as a rock star, yet he is a star sure to fall from the sky. It is only a matter of time before the Zionist date with destiny.

Not long ago the son of a Hamas leader who confessed being a snitch for the Zionists, said he agreed to snitch after he saw nothing shall happen regarding Palestine as long as the two sides maintain their dogmatic religiosity or archaic mythology.

There can be no forward movement with such backward notions of history, of aboriginal claims of ownership based on mythology and religiosity, e.g., the Chosen people of God poppycock. At least the Arabs come from the reality that they were brazenly removed from their homeland.

How does one make peace with someone who has seized your homeland and relegated you to refugee camps within and outside your original space, especially when the occupation is based on injuries inflicted by someone else (Hitler)? Why should Arabs suffer for what Nazis did to the Jews?

The Arabs say they shall fight to the death to reclaim their land, with Hamas fighting for every inch of land taken, no matter how long it takes. It took 200 years before Saladin removed the last Crusaders! The Zionists claim Hamas will not recognize them, but what is the idea of a "Jewish" state but the non-recognition of the Palestinian people? Where is democracy in such a state, where is humanity. It is buried in mythology, a mythology that shall not survive the new era. I don't care what any holy books say, there shall be no peace without justice. This is the magic word missing in the vocabulary of both Netanyahu and President Obama. Nobody wants more than justice and nobody wants less.

What is amazing is that the Zionists have a nuclear arsenal and the greatest army in the Middle East, if not the world--at least until Hezbollah fought them to a standstill in Lebanon (a feat greater than the combined Arab armies in several wars against the Zionists)--yet all we hear is the need for security. What more security do you need? You have bombs, planes, tanks, soldiers, bio-chemical weapons of mass destruction and nukes, what more security do you need? Would tightening the grip on the Arab concentration camps suffice, i.e., will the Wall you are building satisfy your security needs, a checkpoint on every block, every mile? A snitch in every Arab home?

No matter the intractable positions on both sides, we are nearing a conclusion on this matter, yes, in spite of the duplicity of all concerned, the Zionists, their American sycophants, and the quisling Muslim governments in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf States. Also, we cannot ignore the critical role of Iran in this drama, with their support of Hamas and Hezbollah for matters of their mythological dreams.

All these myths must be cast into the dustbin of history and a new vision must be adopted by all sides, no matter how painful. But again, the vision must be based on justice, not peace. Peace with boots on the neck is not a real and lasting peace. It is a sham peace and it will only hasten the day of judgment.

What we have is a prescription for full blown Armageddon. Let the fundamental Christians rejoice along with the 12vers in Iran who anxiously await the return of the 12th Imam or Mahdi, while the Christians savor the return of their Messiah with the destruction of Jerusalem, or an even more dramatic total destruction of the Middle East.

Either the Palestinians shall obtain their state or we shall simply await the final Holocaust that will supposedly usher in the new era of peace in the world. If the 1967 borders are indefensible, equally indefensible is the idea of a "Jewish" state. This idea doesn't border on insanity, it is the essence of insanity, a total break with reality.
--Marvin X
3/15/10

Revised 5/25/11

Although Marvin X is considered the father of Muslim American literature (Dr. Mohja Kahf), his thinking is Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality, the title of his 2007 book on consciousness that Mumia Abu Jamal called "an encyclopedia of knowledge."

The World We Want is the World We Need

The World We Want Is the World We Need

This is the text of a talk presented by Vijay Prashad at The Riverside Church in New York on May 20, 2011 at an event entitled The World We Want Is the World We Need, sponsored by the Brecht Forum and Critical Resistance, and co-sponsored by the Mission and Social Justice Ministry of Riverside Church, Bluestockings Books, the Counterpublic Collective, the Indypendent, and the National Lawyers Guild, NYC Chapter. Also speaking at this event was Angela Davis, Ruthie Gilmore and Laura Flanders, and Mahina Movement performed two sets of music. 2400 people attended.

--Sam Anderson

by Vijay Prashad

We must love one another or die. --W. H. Auden

Capitalism is like a roller coaster. The dynamism of ruthless profit pushes against the constraints of humanity and technology to produce the boom years. But the very pressures of cutting wages and substituting machines for people creates unruly competition – the vast mass of humanity has not enough money in hand to buy goods, and the piles of wastedgoods tempers the enthusiasm of capital to make more. We enter the bust years.

Pressures from workers and the discovery of the dangers of the bust years lead to the idea that the State must spend taxed money or borrowed money to stimulate the economy. Where social democracy is stronger, the money was spent on the social side of things: on health care, on education, on public transportation, on public parks, on the social wages that both revved up the stalled economy and provided the basis of social solidarity. Such a social democratic path provided the objective basis for socialism: people might take pleasure in social interchange, in mutual care and solicitude. This was not capital's preferred path. It has a harsher tendency.

In the United States, from the late 19th century to the present, spending on the social side of the ledger has not gone above 15% of the Gross Domestic Product. Here, the government has conducted its countercyclical spending not on the social side but on the side of repression: on the international armed forces and the domestic armed forces; on the military and on the police. You get the stimulus you need but what you don't get is the objective basis for social solidarity. Military and police hierarchies are strengthened, and horizontal social life is eroded.

**

If this was not bad enough, over the past thirty years another social process has added to the grief of normal militarism: what we call globalization. The debt crisis in the Global South sent billions of dollars into the banks of the North. These banks and their industrial counterparts decided to finance their factories outside the high wage zones of the North. Wages are high in the United States because all our basic needs have been privatized: as individuals and families we are responsible for health care, education, transportation, insurance. If we don't earn enough, we will not survive. That is what makes our labor so expensive. If the rich were taxed and if services came to us through the State, we could receive lower wages and produce goods at a much more competitive rate. But that is not so. Instead, the State encouraged firms to take their industrial capital to zones of cheaper labor – making more and more people in the United States utterly disposable, redundant to the changed economy. It is to control them, to corral them that the prison-industrial complex grew, and that the police forces expanded. The State has no future for its people; it can only offer incarceration of one kind or another. Everybody dies, but not everybody lives.

Banks also turned their accumulated capital into financial wizardry. Mathematics is the lead science, not chemistry, physics or biology. Things are no longer to be made for profits to be harnessed; it is enough to manipulate numbers. Finance makes its own maps; it has its own atlas. Money makes wide detours around the human imagination. Disposable people are needed to sign the forms for no-money-down-payments; and then they are needed to take the blame for the system's torments. Their hopes and dreams, their visions and needs are not at the center of things.

Some believe that the world will end on Saturday. Our framework is not so random, so catastrophic. I too believe in the End Times. In the End Time for Capitalism, a system rooted in the destruction of the human spirit. Democracy is our prejudice, but it does not fully exist yet. It is an idea, it provides space for action, but it has not yet been incarnated fully: the secular Rapture will be the day when Democracy will come into its own.

**

Democracy makes its appearance in the streets of Egypt, and elsewhere in the Arab Revolt. They follow events in Latin America, from the Venezuelan Caracazo of 1989 to the Bolivian Gas Wars in 2003-2005. They follow as well the events in the rest of Africa, from the unrest over the Kenyan elections of 2007-08 to the Enough is Enough protests in Nigeria of the past years. The people know or feel this idea of democracy, and they have decided to enact it on their streets. For them, the idea is no longer simply a slogan; the script is being read out in public.

And furthermore, this is a socialist idea, for at its depth is a scream for popular control over institutions, not simply for a transference of power from one section of the elite to another.

Egypt's Pharonic State had a sophisticated security apparatus, with a necklace of prisons around Cairo itself. The upsurge has taken aim at these prisons. But it is not enough for them to target the prisons. These are an emblem of a system that relied upon incarceration for its stability and its treasury (The U. S. bursary of $3billion per year was designed to contain dissent among the Egyptian people and to keep in place the peace deal with Israel). To truly end the security state, the people had to recapture their politics and their economy and wash the toxicity out of their society. An early indication of this total view was the strikes by the Suez workers, and the threat to close down the Suez Canal: that would be an internationalist gesture, with their hands on the lever of a tenth of the world's trade.

Every country gets the fascism it deserves. And so too its revolutionary task. The Arab Revolt is taking care of its various confounding structures. It is their job. The help we can give them is to begin the long process of dismantling the imperial tentacles, including ending the subsidy given to the Egyptian army as a bribe on behalf of Israel. Our job is not to run their revolution; our job is to lift the
U.S. boot from the necks of the Arab people.

That boot goes down in the name of Justice and Peace, in the name of humanitarian intervention. By temperament, George W. Bush destroyedt his permission to bomb – he was too brash, too unable to mask raw force behind sweet words. Barack Obama is more sophisticated. He has rehabilitated humanitarian intervention, which is the window dressing that imperialism needs to counter our wider ideas and aspirations for democracy. When the empire acts, it is never on the side of the good. Historians go back and find that it is hard to rehabilitate the war aims of imperialism: negotiations are on to bring the Taliban back to authority, so where is the concern for Afghan women now? So too with Libya, where the neo-liberals like Mahmud Jibril and Shokri Ghanem will be handed the keys to the country – absent erratic and ruthless Gaddafi. Much the same in Haiti: the boot does not bring justice, which is the collateral damage of imperialism.

The neo-liberal project of the United States has come undone in the economic sphere. That project was never about economics alone. It had its limits, such as the reliance by the United States on others to buy its substantial debt. The way to ensure that this debt is covered is by political pressure, by military force: the Chinese, Saudis and Europeans continue to cover the US bills because they recognize the Dollar as the planet's main currency, and they allow the US to protect their interests with its substantial military force.

If domestic prisons and prison-like conditions maintain an immoral peace inside the country, the planetary reach of the US war machine maintains power for the global elite against humanity. Maps point to places where life is evil now: Afghanistan, Libya, Bahrain, Gaza, and Detroit. The military aspect of neo-liberalism is alive and well. We might not have responsibility for the way things turn out in Egypt, but we are certainly responsible for the militarism that keeps us afloat.

Our job is to build our movements, to incarnate democracy in our spaces. Critical Resistance and the Brecht Forum are anchors. They deserve our support. So do all the other small platforms that will help us build across our society, to end prisons and prison-like conditions, to make our politics more humane, our society less toxic. So do new formations like the United National Anti-War Committee, and others who want to unfurl the banner of Peace over our cities.

We live in freedom by necessity. We must reshape our world. We must love one another, or die.

[Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His most recent book, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize for 2009. The Swedish and French editions are just out. He can be reached at vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu.]
























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New York Vision Festival, June 5-11

Louis Reyes Rivera




Woody King









Ed Bullins




Amiri Baraka















Marvin X















16 YEARS OF VISION FESTIVAL

take a stand
• Take A Stand – Arts and Community
Arts For Art maintains a commitment to understand what is at play in the world around us and theeffect on our creative community. We are leading the way in building opportunities for uniting the spectrum of the innovative creative jazz music and related arts. The Vision Festival draws people from around the world who are interested in the great, the creative and the innovative with a shared sense of social responsibility. AFA has been working to strengthen the artistic communities by holding town meetings, panel discussions and creating opportunities for artists to perform and come together – to build a power through unity.

This year’s festival features 3 Public Discussions:

June 5 – 4pm

Opening the Festival - Obama, Class Struggle, The Media & The Arts
Panelists:
Amiri Baraka - The last Poet Laureate of New Jersey
Ed Bullins – Playwright; former Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party
Woodie King - director and producer; founder and president of New Federal Theatre
Marvin X - Prime Minister of Poetry, First Poet's Church of the Latter Day Egyptian Revisionists
William Parker – bassist, composer
Louis Reyes Rivera, moderator – Poet; Former host of Perspective on WBAI

June 6 – 5pm

Imagining a Culture of Resistance & Radical Vision: Artists & Social Action
A panel of artists and activists from different perspectives explore the role of art and culture in
changing the world today, challenging people to think critically and envisioning another way the
world could be.

Panelists: Marc Ribot, David Henderson, Patricia Parker, Annie Day, Brandon Ross,
Michael Heller moderator.

June 9 – 5pm

Innovative Music in Education –

Musicians take on the struggle to include innovative music as part of arts curriculum,
and discuss the why and how to accomplish this critical task.

Panelists: Gerald Cleaver, Daniel Levin, Tom Zlabinger, Nicole Federici, Juan Pablo Carletti
Michael Heller moderator

Abrons Art Center is at 466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street) New York, NY 10002.
For more information visit www.artsforart.org, or contact us at 212-254-5420.