Your President is obviously playing election year politics with black life, trying to insure the black vote is solid so he can continue his policy of killing children around the world, e.g., Iraq,Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere too numerous to mention with the USA's trillion dollar military killing machine. If he cares so much about the sons that could be his son, why doesn't he call for an end to New York's stopping and frisking of 700,000 young black men like Trayvon Martin? After all, if they fail the "tone test" they could all end up like Trayvon. When stopped, depending on the tone of voice, black men can be arrested, released or killed.
Why doesn't he call for a general amnesty of the 2.4 million incarcerated black, brown and poor white sons locked down in the America gulags for mostly petty crimes committed while they were drug addicted and mentally ill?
Why doesn't he have a jobs program for his American sons, similar to the one he's offering the young men in Afghanistan if they will lay down their arms and pledge allegiance to the puppet Karzai regime? How can he offer the Taliban sons housing, jobs and education while his American sons are homeless, jobless, ignorant, drug addicted and mentally ill? Vote for me, I'll set you free!
--Marvin X
Obama on Trayvon Martin: ‘If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon’
President Obama, addressing the shooting of an unarmed Florida high school student, made a personal appeal for further investigation into an incident he described as a “tragedy.”
“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Obama said from the Rose Garden, referring to 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was killed by a neighborhood watch guard last month. “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids.”
The case has stirred immense passions nationwide for its racial element: Martin, who was black, was killed by George Zimmerman, 28, a Hispanic neighbor, who has since claimed self-defense. Zimmerman has not been charged in the shooting.
Obama had refrained from commenting on the case, leaving it to Attorney General Eric Holder to navigate the details, and on Friday, Obama chose his words carefully. He did not declare the shooter guilty, and said it is “imperative that we investigate every aspect of this.”
Obama spoke directly to the parents of the young boy, who was walking back from a convenience store carrying candy and drinks when he was killed. The parents, Obama said, “are right to expect that all of us, as Americans, are going to treat this with the seriousness it deserves.”
--Washington Post
Let's be clear, the infidels have lost the war in Afghanistan and shall exit in a manner similar to Vietnam, perhaps only slower thus more pitiful but shameful none the less. The Afghans thus maintain their tradition of defeating all occupiers since Alexander the Great. --Marvin X
Western countries scramble for Afghan exitsBy Fozil Mashrab
TASHKENT, Uzbekistan - As international forces prepare for withdrawal from Afghanistan, Western countries are already in talks with Afghanistan's Central Asian neighbors to bring their troops and military equipment back home.
The Pakistani route and the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) running through Central Asian countries are the two viable routes for international forces to withdraw from Afghanistan.
The United States and Afghanistan are in the process of negotiating an accord for a long-term US presence in Afghanistan after 2014, when most foreign combat forces are due to withdraw. The US wants some advisers and special forces to stay on.
There are also "emergency scenario options" in the event either or both of the Pakistani route or/and the NDN are closed. This would require airlifting military equipment to Ulyanovsk airport in Russia or even to a suitable military airport in India, and from there transporting it to the nearest port city.
The Pakistani route, which has remained closed since November 2011 after a "friendly fire incident" involving North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces at the AfPak border area which killed 26 Pakistani soldiers and wounded dozens others, was partially reopened earlier this year to allow the US and NATO to ship food items to Afghanistan.
Currently, both US and Pakistani authorities are in search of a mutually acceptable arrangement that would allow both sides to scale down negative feelings and fully reopen the Pakistani route.
Such an arrangement could include a sharp increase in transit fees for US and NATO convoys crossing Pakistani territory, while the US could also insist that Pakistani military forces provide stronger security for these convoys.
Meanwhile, Western governments have already started to cultivate Afghanistan's Central Asian neighbors by dispatching their top military officials and defense ministers to various capitals.
Since the beginning of 2012, apart from frequent visits of US military officials to respective Central Asian countries, United Kingdom Defense Secretary Philip Hammond, Latvian Defense Minister Artis Pabriks and more recently Federal Defense Minister of Germany Thomas de Maiziere and Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak have visited Uzbekistan, the key Central Asian country that is part of the NDN. The UK deputy defense secretary is expected to visit Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in the near future.
It has been reported that the US government has already secured the consent of some of the Central Asian countries to use their territory to bring heavy military equipment out of Afghanistan.
Other NATO member countries, especially those that have large military contingents in Afghanistan, such as the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, Poland, are also trying to secure similar arrangements for themselves.
However, there have also been some dissenting voices among Western countries with regards to the costs involved in withdrawing troops and equipment from Afghanistan using the NDN though Central Asia.
In particular, French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet was reported recently to have voiced his preference for using the Pakistani route in view of the higher costs involved for transporting military equipment through Central Asian countries compared to the Pakistani route.
France and other NATO countries' military officials have been quietly angry over various negative incidents involving US troops in Afghanistan recently; these they believe help fuel anti-US and anti-Western feelings in Afghanistan and put their troops at increased danger. The killing of several French soldiers by an Afghan trainee recently is a case in point.
Recently, the US government has intensified its efforts to reach out to the Pakistani government by resuming high-level talks to convince it to reopen the Pakistani route.
United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's meeting with Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar on the margins of the "Somali Conference" in London and the visit of General James Mattis, commander of US Central Command, to Pakistan in February are part of the bilateral efforts to mend ties.
Both sides seem to be slowly edging towards reconciliation, for their own reasons. After a decade of military cooperation with the US on Afghanistan, Pakistan seems to have developed dependency on the billions of dollars in US military and financial aid it receives and which was suspended last year when relations between the countries deteriorated precipitously.
What is more, Uzbekistan's "no" to allowing its territory to be used for the transit of "lethal" military equipment to and out of Afghanistan adds urgency to US efforts to talk sweet to Pakistan.
At the same time, the US plans to utilize the "Tajikistan-Kyrgyzstan-Kazakhstan-Russia-Latvia" route bypassing Uzbekistan as an alternative to transport heavy military equipment out of Afghanistan.
Most probably, the US will strip everything "lethal" from its heavy military equipment to transport through Uzbekistan rather than take the long and tortuous route bypassing Uzbekistan though Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Moreover, in an effort to secure Central Asian countries' cooperation and goodwill for transporting equipment out of Afghanistan, the US and British governments have dangled the prospect of donating some of their military equipment to those countries that allow the transit of material. This would be in addition to transit and other fees paid to each Central Asian country.
The high cost involved aside, the NDN also some advantages over the Pakistani route - the security of the convoys.
Previously, frequent attacks by Pakistan based pro-Taliban militant groups on US and NATO convoys and scenes of burning trucks carrying fuel and other military vehicles were part of the picture for using the Pakistani route.
Therefore, the security of the convoys will be an important calculation for Western countries that wish to make an "honorable" and smooth exit from Afghanistan, rather than being seen as getting chased out of the country and plundered on the way out.
According to Western observers, both the NDN and the Pakistani routes will need to remain open to allow for a timely and orderly withdrawal of Western troops and military equipment from Afghanistan - the failure to reopen the Pakistani route might lead to the rescheduling of withdrawal deadlines.
Fozil Mashrab is a pseudonym used by an independent analyst based in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
The Journal of Pan African Studies (www.jpanafrican.com) has extended its call for papers for a special edition on ‘Leadership in Africana/Black Studies’. Thus, we call for papers that investigate the lived experiences of those who hold or held a leadership position in the construction of Africana/Black Studies.Contributions may come in the form of interviews, personal narratives, oral histories, multi-media presentations, and other means that extract the mission, goals, objectives and outcomes of Africana/Black Studies. And we also welcome self-reflective analysis and contributions from our new generation of leaders within Black Studies.
Our selection criteria involves: relevance to theme, clarity of paper, intellectual significance, and originality. Participants should send us a 50 word abstract by April 24, 2012, and their final paper by July 15, 2012 (the paper and abstract must include your name, affiliation, paper title, and e-mail address) to atjpas@gmail.com.
Itibari M. Zulu, Th.D.
Senior Editor, The Journal of Pan African Studies;
Vice President, The African Diaspora Foundation; Founding Member & Vice Chair, The Bennu Institute of Arizona
We know New York's Stop and Frisk law originated in the Black Codes of the American slave system, as much of American law and institutions, including the police who evolved from the slave catchers. It is shameful to know nearly 700,000
black and minority men were stopped by the NYPD last year. It is disgusting to watch it happen on the streets of New York, especially and mostly in black neighborhoods. It is indicative of life under occupation, similar to the Gaza Strip or the West Bank in occupied Palestine, or the old apartheid regime in South Africa.
Perhaps the NYPD should follow the example of the pass system used in South Africa or in San Francisco during the hunt for Patty Hearst: all black men in San Francisco were stopped and given a pass to carry while the hunt for the kidnapped rich white girl was on. I was stopped and given a pass to indicate the SFPD were familiar with me already so I could hurry on my business.
An old black woman once said, "It ain't so bad being black, it's just inconvenient." And so it is. Aside from Henry Louis Gates, life is much different when a black lives in a white community, one is treated so very different by the police. I had a rich friend who lived in a affluent area of the Bay where few blacks lived. His teenage son was stopped repeatedly for driving with no license, no registration, no insurance and speeding. Each time the police simply called his father to come get his son and that was it. Isn't this wonderful? On one occasion I was babysitting this teenager when he had a party and the police came. Even though the teenagers were drinking and smoking weed, the officers only wanted to know if an adult was present. When I came to the door, the officers said, "Sir, thank you and have a nice evening."
The reemergence of Jim Crow laws represent a society in fear of itself, its children, especially those "other" children, simply because they are not wanted nor needed in the global economy. They are worth more in jail, prison and juvenile hall. The slave catchers returned the slaves to their owners, although they could kill them if they resisted, but they had to pay the owners for the loss of their property. Today, the Africans caught in the neo-slave system are worthless and thus can be killed by the police (slave catchers) or can kill themselves as in black on black homicide. Surely, there was no black on black homicide during the centuries of the American slave system. A black wouldn't think of killing another black owned by the white master.
How long can this go on, this low intensity war against North American Africans? Perhaps we should fill the jails and prisons, even though at this hour there are 2.4 million incarcerated, mostly black, brown and poor white. Would America then feel save and secure when all unneeded black men are off the streets, and of course their families would be placed in family prisons or community centers since the ghettos would quickly be gentrified with yuppies and buppies so that the American life can return to its normal state in the world of make believe.
The jails and prisons would then, of course, be places of education in revolution and critical thinking, where black men could configure a new life when the opportunity afforded itself. Resistance would grow to a point when a general amnesty would be forced upon the socalled American social order and probably a large population of the disaffected would be deported to some territory within or without these United States of America. --Marvin X
Taking On Police Tactic, Critics Hit Racial Divide
ALBANY — Black and Latino lawmakers, fed up over the frequency with which New York City police officers are stopping and frisking minority men, are battling what they say is a racial divide as they push legislation to rein in the practice.
Victor Blue for The New York Times
Councilman Jumaane Williams spoke last month at a rally to change the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy.
The divide, they say, is largely informed by personal experience: many who object to the practice say that they have themselves been stopped by the police for reasons they believe were related to race.
Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat, recalled several occasions when, as a high school student walking home in Flatbush, he was stopped by the police, patted down, told to empty his pockets, produce identification and divulge his destination.
Assemblyman Karim Camara, a Democrat from Brooklyn, remembers greeting a woman who was walking down a street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, when, he said, officers in plain clothes approached him and demanded to know who he was, where he was going and whether he had any guns or drugs.
And when Senator Adriano Espaillat, a Manhattan Democrat, was just 14, he said, detectives threw him against a wall and patted him down in Washington Heights, in Manhattan, when he was on his way to buy a Dominican newspaper for his father.
The lawmakers say the racial imbalance with which stop-and-frisk is applied has a corollary effect: Many white legislators have remained silent on the issue, or have supported the police, revealing a racial gap over attitudes toward the practice.
“There is an ethnic divide on who’s being stopped and frisked, and there is an ethnic divide on who’s fighting against the policy,” said State Senator Eric L. Adams, a Democrat and a retired police captain from Brooklyn.
The lawmakers’ effort to set off a debate in Albany is taking place with an increased focus on the interplay between race and public safety. It was highlighted in New York by the fatal shooting last month of Ramarley Graham, 18, by a police officer in the Bronx, and nationally by the fatal shooting last month of Trayvon Martin, 17, by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida. The young men were unarmed.
“Both illustrate the perils of racial stereotyping when individuals are empowered with the capacity to make life and death decisions,” said Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat. He said the shootings had “further emboldened legislators to continue to fight to deal with the out-of-control stop-and-frisk practices.”
The split among Albany lawmakers over the stop-and-frisk issue reflects a divide among New York City voters: according to a Quinnipiac University poll released on March 13, 59 percent of white voters approve of it, and 27 percent of black voters do.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, facing increased complaints about the practice, has pushed back hard against critics. Last week, assailed by the City Council over the practice, Mr. Kelly said that the policy was an important policing tool intended to reduce the violence that has victimized blacks and Hispanics, and that, “What I haven’t heard is any solution to the violence problems in these communities.”
“People are upset about being stopped,” he continued, “yet what is the answer?”
According to the Police Department, 96 percent of shooting victims last year, and 90 percent of murder victims, were minorities.
“There’s more police assigned to a place like East New York than, say, a precinct in Riverdale,” said the Police Department spokesman, Paul J. Browne, “so the police are going to be in a position to observe suspicious behavior more frequently.”
The Police Department has said that it conducted a record 684,330 stops last year, and that 87 percent of those stopped were black or Hispanic. About 10 percent of the stops led to arrests or summonses and 1 percent to the recovery of a weapon, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has examined police data.
But the Police Department frames the numbers in a different way: last year, it said, it recovered 8,000 weapons, 800 of them handguns, via stops. And over the last decade, the number of murders has dropped by 51 percent, “in part because of stop, question and frisk,” Mr. Browne said.
Some white elected officials have strongly criticized the stop-and-frisk policy. They included the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, and the public advocate, Bill de Blasio, both of whom are likely candidates for mayor; and Brad Lander and Daniel Dromm, who are on the Council. Senator Michael Gianaris, a Democrat from Queens, has offered a bill that would make it illegal for the department to set a quota for the number of stops officers must make.
Mr. Stringer said it was important for elected officials “who look like me” to help broaden the coalition of New Yorkers fighting against stop-and-frisk.
But race continues to dominate discussion of the issue. Assemblyman Keith L. T. Wright, a black Democrat from Harlem, is still smarting over a legislative debate he had in 2008 with Assemblyman David R. Townsend Jr., a white Republican from central New York, on a proposal to prohibit racial profiling. Mr. Townsend said part of good police work involved questioning people who seemed out of place in a particular neighborhood, regardless of their race.
“If you were spotted in an affluent section of Oneida County where we don’t have minority people living, and you were driving around through these houses, and I was a law enforcement officer and a highway patrol, I would stop you to say, No. 1: ‘Are you lost? Is there something we can help you with, or what are you doing here?’ ” Mr. Townsend said to Mr. Wright.
Two years ago, the Legislature passed a law requiring police officials in New York City to no longer store the names and addresses of people stopped but not charged. Gov. David A. Paterson, the state’s first African-American governor, signed the measure despite objections not only from city officials, but also, he said, from an all-white panel advising him on the issue.
In a recent interview, Mr. Paterson, a Democrat, said his views of the measure were informed by his own experience, which included being stopped three times by the police.
“It’s a feeling of being degraded,” he said. “I think that’s what people who it hasn’t happened to don’t understand.”
Now, Mr. Jeffries is sponsoring a bill that would make it a violation, not a crime, to possess small quantities of marijuana in public view. The bill, he said, would curb the tens of thousands of arrests each year that result when officers stop people and ask them to empty their pockets, leading to the revelation of small amounts of marijuana.
Mr. Wright has been urging passage of a bill that would prohibit police officers from stopping people based solely on their race or ethnicity. Mr. Parker is behind legislation to create the post of inspector general for the police.
And in the Council, Jumaane D. Williams has introduced bills that would require officers to inform people they stop that they can refuse to be searched and make mandatory and citywide a pilot program in which officers give those stopped a business card with a phone number, in case they want to lodge a complaint.
Mr. Williams has had his own run-ins with police. He said he was stopped in Brooklyn last year, after he had bought a BMW, by officers who said, “We want to make sure it’s yours.” And, in an episode that drew widespread publicity, he was detained by the police last year after an argument with officers over whether he was allowed to use a closed sidewalk during the West Indian American Day Parade.
“We know that the legislation is not going to stop stop-and-frisk,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is provide more accountability with the N.Y.P.D. and their practices and policies.”
WASHINGTON — The American intelligence community warned in a report released Thursday that problems with water could destabilize countries in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia over the next decade.
Increasing demand and competition caused by the world’s rising population and scarcities created by climate change and poor management threaten to disrupt economies and increase regional tensions, the report concludes.
Prepared at the request of the State Department, the report is based on a classified National Intelligence Estimate completed last October that reflected an increasing focus on environmental and other factors that threaten security. An estimate reflects the consensus judgment of all intelligence agencies.
While the report concluded that wars over water are unlikely in the coming decade, it said that countries could use water for political and economic leverage over neighbors and that major facilities like dams and desalination plants could become targets of terrorist attacks. Coupled with poverty and other social factors, problems with water could even contribute to the political failure of weaker nations.
The public report, unlike the classified version, did not specify countries at greatest risk for water-related disruption but analyzed conditions on major river basins in regions with high potential for conflict — from the Jordan to the Tigris and Euphrates to the Brahmaputra in South Asia.
“During the next 10 years, many countries important to the United States will almost certainly experience water problems — shortages, poor water quality, or floods — that will contribute to the risk of instability and state failure, and increase regional tensions,” the report said. “Additionally states will focus on addressing internal water-related social disruptions which will distract them from working with the United States on important policy objectives.”
The report warned that water shortages would become acute in some regions within the next decade, as demand continued to rise. While disputes over water have historically led to negotiated settlements over access, upstream countries will increasingly use dams and other projects “to obtain regional influence or preserve their water interests” over weaker countries downstream.
This is already happening on the Tigris and Euphrates, where Turkey, Syria and Iran have harnessed the headwaters of the two rivers that flow through Iraq.
The release was timed to the announcement by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton of a partnership to promote conservation and improved management in conjunction with corporations like Coca-Cola and Ford and nongovernmental organizations like the Nature Conservancy.
The report said that improvements in management — like the use of drip irrigation systems — could ease the potential for shortages, especially in agriculture, which accounts for 70 percent of the world’s water use.
How can you win, if you ain't right within?, says a recent rap song. And James Brown sang Money can't save you, but time will take you out! Why do so many artists, myself included, have the need for drugs and alcohol? Applause is not enough, money is not enough, and yes, sometimes love is not enough, especially when there is no love of self. It doesn't matter how many people love you when you don't love yourself. After the concert with fan applause is over, one often sits in the dressing room alone, exhausted and unhappy. At the performance of my play One Day in the Life at San Francisco's Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, Dr. William H. Grier, co-author of the 60s classic Black Rage, asked me how I was doing. I said I don't know. Dr. Grier told his son, "I don't know what's wrong with Marvin, he's got Mayor Willie Brown opening his show, a packed audience and a Jaguar parked outside. What's wrong with him?" Some call it divine discontent, i.e., no matter how many blessings God bestows upon us, it is not enough. And then sometimes we are simply ungrateful bastards. And so we turn to drugs for comfort, to medicate, to reach that altered state of mind that the human touch cannot fulfill, or perhaps the human touch is not there, or perhaps we cannot touch that divine self that must be touched before we can enjoy the touch of another, the love of another, no matter it be husband, wife, children, friend or fans.
But we know the cause for our addiction is deeper than drugs or the trappings of materialism, it is something in the air that stinks like rotten meat, as Langston Hughes put it. Sometime when I'm in the South, I get that feeling that something ain't right up in here, in this blood soaked land, land of the slave system that endures to this day. Or is it that same feeling W.E.B. DuBois felt in China when Chairman Mao introduced him to a million people, "Thank you Chairman Mao for the great introduction, but in my country I am just a nigguh."
Did Whitney feel like just a nigguh, with all her talent, fame and fortune? May Allah grant you peace of mind, Whitney! --Marvin X
Whitney Houston drowned after cocaine use, says coroner
The pop star was laid to rest in her home state of New Jersey after a star-studded funeral
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Whitney Houston's death was caused by accidental drowning, but drug abuse and heart disease were also factors, a coroner has ruled.
Coroner's spokesman Craig Harvey said drug tests indicated the 48-year-old US singer was a chronic cocaine user.
The announcement ends weeks of speculation over the cause of Houston's death.
She was found submerged in the bath of her Los Angeles hotel room on the eve of the Grammy Awards on 11 February.
In a statement, the LA County Coroner's office described Houston's manner of death as an "accident", adding that "no trauma or foul play is suspected".
The cause was cited as drowning and "effects of atherosclerotic heart disease and cocaine use".
Other drugs found in her blood included marijuana, as well as an anti-anxiety drug, a muscle relaxant and an allergy medication.
But these were not factors in her death, the coroner's statement said.
Patricia Houston, the singer's sister-in-law and manager, told the Associated Press news agency: "We are saddened to learn of the toxicology results, although we are glad to now have closure."
The pop star was laid to rest at a cemetery in her home state of New Jersey after a funeral that was attended by celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey and Mary J Blige.
The singer, who was one of the world's best selling artists from the mid-1980s to late 1990s, had a long battle with drug addiction.
If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursèd lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
