Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Monday, June 24, 2013
Marvin X and Queen Rahmana Ali at Berkeley Juneteenth
The USA's Rumi, Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland, Black Arts Movement co-founder, Marvin X with the Divine Black Queen, Mother of the Universe, Rahmana Ali.
Book Signing tonight in NYC: Evolution of a Black Nationalist Revolutionary
We met Herman Ferguson during his exile from America in Guyana, SA, 1972. He was among a group of North American Africans who'd taken refuge from American racism at the invitation of the Forbes Burnham Black Power government. Also there were Tom Feelings, Julian Mayfield, Mamadou Lumumba, et al. Long live the Revolutionary Black Nationalist, Herman Ferguson!--Marvin X
June 24th, 2013 7:30 PM
BOOK SIGNING & DISCUSSION
An Unlikely Warrior- Evolution of a Black Nationalist Revolutionary
Iyaluua Ferguson & Herman Ferguson
An Unlikely Warrior tells the amazing biographic story of Herman Ferguson. The book chronicles his evolution from an “ all- american “ boy growing up in the Jim Crow South to a Pan Africanist/ Black Nationalist activist who has been involved in the Political Prisoner Movement, Reparations Movement, and a myriad of other social justice movements. A former NYC Public School Assistant Principal, Ferguson, now 92 years young, was a founding member of Malcolm X’s Organization Of Afro American Unity. A target of the infamous COINTELPRO campaign by the United States government and NYPD against the Black Liberation movement, Ferguson was charged with conspiracy to kill two prominent civil rights and , upon conviction, went into exile for nearly twenty years. When he returned to the US, he was incarcerated. Although close to 70 years of age upon his release from prison, Ferguson rejoined the movement for Black equality and human rights, forming the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee , co- founding the Jericho Movement, and other organizations.
Sliding scale: $6/$10/$15
Free for Brecht Forum Subscribers
Brecht Forum
451 West Street
(WESTSIDE HIWAY AND BANK STREET)
New York, NY 10014
Eyes on the Sparrow: J. Herman Blake, PhD
We first met Dr. Blake when we worked as a researcher at UC Berkeley, 1964,
writing case histories of the "culturally deprived." Dr. Blake helped bring Malcolm X
to UCB where he spoke before seven thousand students in front of Sproul Hall. Years later, Dr. Blake assisted Huey Newton in the writing of his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide and his PhD dissertation. The last time we talked was when he was appointed Chair of the Gullah Studies Department, University of South Carolina. Blake is a Gullah from Johns Island, along with Amiri Baraka whose original family name was Johns but changed it to Jones when they left the island.
Dr. Blake was given a spacious building but we heard the racists had no intention to have a nigger in such an elaborate facility. He was soon gone. Not long ago he delivered a lecture in the Bay Area at a sociology conference. He told how he visited Huey P. Newton almost daily while he was in prison.
Dr. Blake is one of those persons who shuns the center stage but is critical in the background.
--Marvin X
Saturday, June 22, 2013
Is Obama Filthy McNasty in America's Dirty Wars?
Drawn from the ranks of the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, former Blackwater and other private security contractors, the CIA’s Special Activities Division and the Joint Special Operations Command ( JSOC), these elite soldiers operate worldwide, with thousands of secret commandos working in more than one hundred countries. Funded through “black budgets,” Special Operations Forces conduct missions in denied areas, engage in targeted killings, snatch and grab individuals and direct drone, AC-130 and cruise missile strikes. While the Bush administration deployed these ghost militias, President Barack Obama has expanded their operations and given them new scope and legitimacy.
Friday, June 21, 2013
Men on Strike: Society's War on Men
Men on Strike: Society's War On Men
by Helen Smith
American society has become anti-male. Men are sensing the backlash and are consciously and unconsciously going on strike. They are dropping out of college, leaving the workforce, and avoiding marriage and fatherhood at alarming rates. Other books have addressed this problem in terms of its impact on women; Male Strike looks at the topic from the viewpoint of men: Why should they participate in a system that seems to be increasingly stacked against them? As the interviews and surveys in this book demonstrate, men aren't dropping out because they're immature man-children. They are acting rationally in response to the lack of incentives society offers them to be responsible fathers, husbands, and providers. Male Strike describes this phenomenon and offers solutions and action-oriented advice to men, to society, and to the women who love them.(less)
Hardcover, 176 pages
Published June 18th 2013 by Encounter Books
Breakfast with Black Elected Officials and Faith Based Leaders
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On the Rocks: Southern University, Baton Rouge-terminates tenured professors without notice!
AAUP Releases Investigative Report on SUBR
Washington, DC—Administrators at Southern University, Baton Rouge (SUBR), used a declaration of financial exigency to terminate the appointments of tenured professors and sidestep the faculty’s participation in decisions to restructure the university’s academic programs, according to an investigative report by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The report was written by a committee of AAUP members with no previous involvement in the situation, chaired by Professor Edward F. Sherman of Tulane University. The report is available athttp://www.aaup.org/report/academic-freedom-and-tenure-southern-university-baton-rouge.
The AAUP authorized the investigation after receiving complaints from SUBR faculty members that the administration had laid off tenured professors with no provision for the hearing before a faculty committee called for by the Association’s widely accepted academic standards and with as little as thirty days’ notice. The tenure terminations followed a 10 percent furlough mandated for all faculty members immediately after the board of supervisors declared financial exigency in October 2011. The faculty senate had asserted that the budgetary shortfall stemmed in significant part from the administration’s decision to shift money from the academic budget to the athletics program and the laboratory school. After exigency was declared, the provost instructed department chairs to submit, within a period of days, recommendations of department colleagues to be targeted for layoff. At the same time, a reorganization of the university’s nine colleges into five moved forward for board approval without the faculty’s knowledge.
The administration issued notice to nineteen tenured professors between February and May 2012. In some cases, department chairs were unaware that members of their department had been selected for layoff. Professors who received notice had seven business days to file an appeal with the chancellor. All appeals to him were denied, except for one from an appellant who had been notified erroneously.
To evade the due-process requirements for appointment terminations and the faculty’s participation in decision making in crucial areas, the board of supervisors, during the same meeting at which it declared exigency, adopted new procedures for implementing financial exigency. In doing so, the board ignored existing AAUP-recommended procedures for financial exigency that it had adopted in 1987 as a condition of its removal from the AAUP’s list of censured administrations.
Under AAUP standards, terminations of tenured faculty appointments on grounds of financial exigency may take place only after a determination by the faculty that a demonstrably bona fide financial crisis exists that threatens the institution as a whole and that all feasible alternatives to faculty layoffs have been exhausted. The faculty bears responsibility for identifying the criteria for terminating appointments and the appropriate group or individual to determine which appointments to terminate. Any faculty member so identified has the right to a hearing before a faculty committee before a final decision is made.
The AAUP report deals with the decision to declare financial exigency, the procedural shortcomings with which the appointment terminations were effected, and the role of the faculty in developing the restructuring plan. The committee found “the administration’s ex post facto changes to the faculty handbook, adopted on the day the board declared financial exigency, to be an apparent attempt to avoid the existing standards of the board and handbook.” The report concludes that the SUBR administration, in declaring financial exigency, restructuring academic programs without consulting the faculty, and terminating the nineteen tenured faculty appointments, disregarded fundamental AAUP principles, thereby weakening the climate for academic freedom that tenure is designed to protect.
“By laying off nineteen senior professors on short notice, while simultaneously deducting 10 percent from the salaries of all faculty members through mandatory furloughs, the SUBR administration managed to combine the worst of two worlds,” says AAUP Associate General Secretary Jordan E. Kurland.
Southern University, Baton Rouge, is the flagship campus in the Southern University system, a public, historically black, land-grant university system with five campuses in Louisiana. With an enrollment of approximately seven thousand students, SUBR is one of the country’s top ten producers of baccalaureate degrees awarded to African Americans.
Publication of the investigating committee’s report was approved by the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which at its May 31–June 1 meeting will formulate a statement on SUBR. The statement may recommend that the AAUP’s 2013 annual meeting on June 15 impose censure.
For more information, please contact Jenn Nichols at (202) 737-5900 ext. 3651
The American Association of University Professors is a nonprofit charitable and educational organization that promotes academic freedom by supporting tenure, academic due process, and standards of quality in higher education. The AAUP has approximately 47,000 members at colleges and universities throughout the United States.
Media Contact:
Jenn Nichols
Publication Date:
Thursday, April 4, 2013
War, What is it good for: US to hold talks with Taliban!
After over a decade of war against the Taliban, the Crusaders now decide to hold peace talks--Remember Vietnam! Why was it necessary to kill and maim in Afghanistan when ultimately peace talks will take place? There must be another reason, as in Capsian Sea oil, opium and jobs for the
US military, corporate complex.--Marvin X
Taliban Talks Could Depend on Detainees
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
Published: June 20, 2013 Comment
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WASHINGTON — Two were senior Taliban commanders said to be implicated in murdering thousands of Shiites in Afghanistan. When asked about the alleged war crimes by an interrogator, they “did not express any regret and stated they did what they needed to do in their struggle to establish their ideal state,” according to their interrogators.
Department of Defense
The five Taliban prisoners in the proposed exchange are from top left: Mohammad Nabi Omari, Abdul Haq Wasiq, Mullah Norullah Noori, Mullah Mohammad Fazl, Khirullah Said Wali Khairkhwa.
There is also a former deputy director of Taliban intelligence, a former senior Taliban official said to have “strong operational ties” to various extremist militias, and a former Taliban minister accused of having sought help from Iran in attacking American forces.
These five prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, could be the key to whether the negotiations the United States has long sought with the Taliban are a success, or even take place. A Taliban spokesman in Qatar said Thursday that exchanging them for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, an American prisoner of war who has been held by militants since 2009, would be a way to “build bridges of confidence” to start broader peace talks.
Less than a month ago, President Obama gave a speech reiterating his desire to close Guantánamo. But one official familiar with internal deliberations emphasized that any exchange involving the Afghan prisoners should not be seen as part of efforts the president has ordered to winnow the prison of low-level detainees.
The five Taliban members are considered to be among the most senior militants at Guantánamo and would otherwise be among the last in line to leave.
The Taliban offer, which was made at the same time they were opening a long-delayed office in Doha, Qatar, breathed new life into a proposal floated in late 2011 that collapsed amid Congressional skepticism and the strict security conditions the Obama administration sought as part of any exchange. They included the stipulation that the Taliban prisoners be sent to Qatar and forbidden to leave there.
Those conditions, created by the Obama administration to comply with legal restrictions imposed by Congress to prevent any detainees from returning to the battlefield in Afghanistan, led the Taliban to walk away from the negotiations. It is not clear whether the Taliban position on transfers to Qatar, as opposed to outright release and repatriation, has softened.
Any prisoner release, according to officials familiar with the deliberations, is not imminent. The transfer restrictions require 30 days’ notice to lawmakers before any detainee leaves, and the administration has not yet given any notification. The officials would not comment on the record because of the diplomatic and political delicacy of the issue.
One of the leading skeptics of such a deal has been Representative Howard P. McKeon, a California Republican who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. On Thursday, Claude Chafin, a spokesman for Mr. McKeon, said the congressman would want to know what plans the administration had to ensure that the five would remain under watch.
“Absent any actual details, the chairman remains very concerned that these five individuals should never be allowed to re-engage,” Mr. Chafin said.
The details of what the government believes about what the five former Taliban leaders have done were made public in classified military files given to WikiLeaks by Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is now being court-martialed and faces a possible life sentence if convicted of the most serious charges against him. Because the five men have never been given a trial, the quality of the evidence and the credibility of the claims against them in the files — some of which they deny — have not been tested.
Mohammad Nabi Omari is described in the files as “one of the most significant former Taliban leaders detained” at Guantánamo. He is said to have strong operational ties to anti-coalition militia groups, including Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Haqqani network. He is also accused of participating in a cell in Khost that was “involved in attacks against U.S. and coalition forces,” maintaining weapons caches and smuggling fighters and weapons.
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