Tag Archives: Institutionalized Racism

To America, Black Lives Only Sometimes Matter

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By Tony Cartalucci

Source: Land Destroyer

There is no doubt that colonialism and racism sit at the root of America’s domestic problems. The push to dominate others abroad is directly linked to the belief that those who are different at home should also be dominated.

There are still Americans alive today that remember segregation laws that denied black Americans their basic rights and dignity. Before that, there was outright slavery.

Even today, racism is still institutionalized. It also permeates American culture, laying just beneath a superficial layer of tolerance and equality.

This is not just about white people who remain racist against blacks and other minorities – a product of America’s terminally ill culture – it is also about fundamental racism that still very much sits at the heart of American foreign and domestic policy – against not only blacks, but virtually every race on the planet from Africans to Asians to even Slavs.

The US is a nation that encourages its people to hate entire groups of people abroad to help justify otherwise unjust wars. Arabs, Chinese people, Russians – are all vilified with bigotry and hatred sanctioned by mainstream American culture. It isn’t hard to see why in a nation like this, hatred for other groups is easily justified in the minds of racists and the unjust.

Not Just Police in America – Racism is a Key Feature of US Foreign Policy 

It was under US President Barack Obama that the US decimated the North African nation of Libya, deposing Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi – a champion of African dignity and progress and the champion of tens of thousands of blacks from all over Africa who travelled to Libya to find work and a better life – work and a better life Gaddafi provided them until he was brutally murdered and his government replaced by heavily armed, racist terrorists backed by the US and its European allies.

US-backed militants in Libya would hunt down Libya’s black population, killing them, torturing them, and even enslaving them in open air slave markets – a spectacle one might have believed was unthinkable in the 21st century – but something made possible by America, its foreign policy, and its deeply rooted racism and sense of supremacy – despite having a “black” president at the time.

President Obama is hardly the only one to blame – he simply picked up where others left off – and his successor, US President Donald Trump is simply next in line to carry forward systemic US injustice worldwide. The fact that President Obama was black made no difference and simply helps illustrate how while superficial milestones are waved in America’s face – the fundamental rot of injustice, racism, and supremacist thinking persists.

When a nation is able to justify denying one group of people their dignity, worth, and rights as human beings it is a slippery slope that easily leads to other groups likewise being stripped of their humanity and abused.

If Black Lives Matter – They Must Always Matter, Everywhere, All the Time 

Any case of police brutality is tragic and needs to be addressed -a problem in its own right. If officers killed George Floyd because he was black, it represents an additional problem that must also be addressed.

If Americans genuinely believe black lives matter – then they need to commit to fighting injustice against them, and all other victims of American racism and supremacy. If they speak up only when it is popular and “trending” it’s as good as not speaking up at all.

If they are silent when America is mass murdering blacks overseas, killing brown people across the planet, or attempting to normalize racism against Asians – Chinese people in particular – they are complicit in the very sort of deeply rooted, institutionalized racism that underpins US foreign policy and the globe-spanning industrialized injustice it represents – and the very sort of racism that manifests itself as injustice against blacks at home.

America needs genuine opposition to racism. Not opportunistic posturing.

US politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pose as dedicated to racial equality and fighting racism – yet she regularly finds herself in support of US military aggression abroad which exclusively targets nations populated by black, brown, and Asian people.

Her most recent display of supreme hypocrisy was her support of US meddling in Hong Kong – an extension of the British Empire’s seizure from and subjugation of this Chinese territory.

The British Empire – of course – also pursued its foreign policy based entirely on the belief that white Westerners were superior to all others and that it was their right – even duty – to impose British “civilization” upon “heathen” races – China was no exception to this belief.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may or may not appreciate that her support for US meddling in Hong Kong helps continue this disgraceful tradition and agenda – believing instead that supporting “democracy” in Hong Kong is not simply the same brand of Anglo-American racism merely repackaged for more sensitive global audiences. But she is supporting racism, supremacy, and hegemony all the same.

Black lives will never matter as long as “Black Lives Matter” remains a hollow political slogan shouted by interests easily able to ignore or even support injustice purveyed by the US against others abroad – including blacks.

Deeply rooted racism in the US is just one of many symptoms of an overall desire for hegemony and the notions of racial, political, and cultural supremacy that underpin it. Until this is addressed, racism will continue, with only the most superficial and unsustainable efforts made to stop it.

As long as America believes it is better than all others abroad – able to justify exploitation, coercion, and even military aggression to assert itself and pursue its “interests” – racism and injustice will persist at home. The same corporate-financier interests driving US injustice abroad see the US population – white and black – as merely another market segment to use and abuse – to divide and conquer – to put under itself for its own benefit.

Black lives matter, whether they are being strangled by a racist white cop in America or being bombed by US warplanes in Libya. Once Americans can unite in both understanding and opposing this across-the-board racism and injustice, something might actually be done about it besides kicking the can down the road for a few more months until the next video of police abuse emerges online.

America will not heal its domestic hatred and divisions if it remains built entirely on projecting and profiting from hatred and division abroad. It was no coincidence that legendary champions for equality like Martin Luther King Jr. were both opposed to racism and injustice at home and ceaselessly opposed  to American aggression and hegemony abroad. The two are linked by the common thread of fundamental injustice. Until they are both exposed and smashed completely, they will both continue.

Disposable Americans: The Numbers are Growing

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By Paul Buchheit

Source: Information Clearing House

As often noted in the passionate writings of Henry Giroux, poor Americans are becoming increasingly ‘disposable’ in our winner-take-all society. After 35 years of wealth distribution to the super-rich, inequality has forced much of the middle class towards the bottom, to near-poverty levels, and to a state of helplessness in which they find themselves being blamed for their own misfortunes.

The evidence keeps accumulating: income and wealth — and health — are declining for middle-class America. As wealth at the top grows, the super-rich feel they have little need for the rest of society.

Income Plummets for the Middle Class

According to Pew Research, in 1970 three of every ten income dollars went to upper-income households. Now five of every ten dollars goes to them.

The Social Security Administration reports that over half of Americans make less than $30,000 per year. That’s less than an appropriate average living wage of $16.87 per hour, as calculated by Alliance for a Just Society.

Wealth Collapses for Half of Us

Numerous sources report that half or more of American families have virtually no savings, and would have to borrow money or sell possessions to cover an emergency expense. Between half and two-thirds of Americans have less than $1,000.

For every $100 owned by a middle-class household in 2001, that household now has just $72.

Not surprisingly, race plays a role in the diminishing of middle America. According to Pew Research, the typical black family has only enough liquid savings to last five days, compared to 12 days for the typical Hispanic household, and 30 days for a white household.

Our Deteriorating Health

In a disgraceful display of high-level disregard for vital health issues, House Republicans are attempting to cut back on lunches for over 3 million kids.

The evidence for the health-related disposability of poor Americans comes from a new study that finds nearly a 15 year difference in life expectancy for 40-year-olds among the richest 1% and poorest 1% (10 years for women). Much of the disparity has arisen in just the past 15 years.

It’s not hard to understand the dramatic decline in life expectancy, as numerous studies have documented the health problems resulting from the inequality-driven levels of stress and worry and anger that make Americans much less optimistic about the future. The growing disparities mean that our children will likely see less opportunities for their own futures.

It May Be Getting Worse

The sense derived from all this is that half of America is severely financially burdened, at risk of falling deeper into debt.

It may be more than half. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a JP Morgan study’s conclusion that “the bottom 80% of households by income lack sufficient savings to cover the type of volatility observed in income and spending.” Fewer than one in three 25- to 34-year-olds live in their own homes, a 20 percent drop in just the past 15 years.

It may be even worse for renters. The number of families spending more than half their incomes on rent — the ‘severely’ cost-burdened renters — has increased by a stunning 50 percent in just ten years. Billionaire Steve Schwarzman, whose company Blackstone has been buying up tens of thousands of homes at rock-bottom prices and then renting them back while waiting out the housing market, finds the growing anger among voters “astonishing.”

What’s astonishing is the disregard that many of the super-rich have for struggling Americans.

 

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of “American Wars: Illusions and Realities” (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.

Dallas Shootings: White Supremacists Succeeded in Provoking Black Extremism

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(Editor’s note: Though at this time it’s still too early too tell whether the shooting was in fact an act of black extremism and/or a more complex situation intended to appear that way, the author’s central argument, that the social chaos created by such events benefit a select few, remains valid.)

By Eclinik Learning

Source: Covert Geopolitics

Considered to be one of the worst in US police history, five police officers were shot dead and scores wounded by snipers, presumably as a retaliation to the blatant killings of two black men this week in Louisiana and Minnesota.

Initial reports said that the three snipers were not part of those who joined the Black Lives Matter rally where the shootings occurred.

This event has just raised the confrontation between the white police and the black community to a new level.

The existence of a well-organized group of white supremacists that are occupying positions of power and within the armed services of the government is at the root of all these perennial deadly and racially loaded confrontations.

The graphic video of the murder cannot be subjected to wild speculations because it shows beyond doubt of a cold blooded murders by police officers who happens to be white.

These fanatics are not just hurting black people but they are those same extremists who were aiming their pepper spray to black and white kids alike during those massive Occupy Movement rallies, in close coordination with those same mindless talkingheads who are still running the mainstream media today.

Their aim is to provoke racial, political, and cultural conflict wherever possible. It would be a complete waste of our time to try and change their trajectory considering that these extremists completely believe in their own superiority just by the virtue of the color of their skin.

A more drastic action, like removing them all from power, should be done. These people don’t respond positively to vocal street protests.

As far as this recent event is concern, there is now a very high probability that a counter-retaliation will occur against the black people. But we don’t think that it could reach the level of a full blown racial confrontation considering that a sizable number of the Americans know exactly who the real enemy is.

Who has benefited from this drastic shift of the national attention?

This event undoubtedly and effectively shifted the national conversation away from the FBI’s absolution of one Hillary Clinton for her “extremely careless” handling of state secrets via her personal email server, which in itself was just a mere diversion of more heinous crimes that the Clinton couple have to cover-up all these years.

It would not surprise us a bit if something bad will happen on the other side of the Atlantic to stop the fallout from the Chilcot Report indicating that Tony Blair was lying about everything that has to do with the invasion of Iraq.

Aside from these obvious motivations of escaping executive accountability by covering lies with more lies, and by putting the people of the world constantly on the edge, the endless appetite for gun control and mass surveillance lies at the very foundation of all these unprovoked police shootings and false flag operations.

Only this time, those who survived for a while begun to shoot back. The only problem is that the wrong police may have been the casualties.

It is therefore a lot wiser for those would-be snipers to set their sight directly on the Eye of the Pyramid.

 

Related Video:

Placebo Ballots: Stealing California from Bernie Using an old GOP vote-snatching trick

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By Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein

Source: GregPalast.com

Woop!  Woop!  Alert!  Some California poll workers have been told to give “provisional” ballots to all independent voters in Tuesday’s Democratic Party.

That’s wrong.  That’s evil.  That’s sick and illegal.

Here’s the 411.  If you’re registered as an independent voter in California, you have the right to vote in the Democratic Presidential Primary.  Just ask for the ballot.

But look out!  Reports out of Orange County are that some poll workers have been told to give “No Party Preference” (NPP), that is, an independent voter, a PROVISIONAL ballot, as opposed to a regular ballot.

Do NOT accept a provisional ballot. As one poll worker told me, “They simply don’t get counted.”

Who would benefit from this switcheroo from legal ballot to “provisional” ballot?  It’s just a stone cold fact that independent voters favor Senator Bernie Sanders. Among voters who describe themselves as having “no party preference,” Sanders leads Sec. Hillary Clinton by a humongous 40 points—though Hillary is hugely ahead among registered Democrats.

So one way to steal the election is to make sure those independent voters’ ballots end up in the garbage, uncounted.

Two million “Placebo Ballots” not counted

And for our readers in the other 49 states:  you can bet that the GOP will be shunting voters to these placebo provisional ballots in November.  In the last presidential election, over two MILLION voters, overwhelmingly  voters of color, were shifted to these rarely-counted ballots.  Two million voters could have justwritten their votes on bubbles.  That’s how they steal elections.

No, I’m not promoting Bernie nor my uncle Ernie, nor anyone.  I’m promoting democracy.  Let’s make sure your vote counts.
What is a “Provisional” ballot?  “Provisional” ballots were created by George Bush and Karl Rove as part of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) after they swiped Florida in 2000.

The original idea of provisional balloting was sound: The Congressional Black Caucus was very upset that African-Americans were not able to vote in 2000 in Florida because they were falsely removed from the voter roles for all kinds of cockamamie reasons. So the Black Caucus proposed that, if your name is not on the voter roles, you should still be able to vote provisionally. The state can then check the records and count your vote later.

The Black Caucus won the right to a provisional ballot, but didn’t win the right to have them counted. They rarely are.

Say you are tagged an “inactive” voter, you CANNOT get your provisional ballot counted even if you were wrongly listed as “inactive.”  You’ve been removed from the register.  So, it’s a Catch-22.  You get a provisional ballot because you were wrongly left off the voter roll, but it can’t be counted because, well, you’re not on the voter roll.

And that’s why I call provisional ballots “Placebo” ballots.   They let you feel like you voted, but you haven’t.  It’s ridiculously easy to challenge a provisional ballot – so in a tight race, it’s just tossed out.

California Reamin’
I am currently reporting from Southern California, and I got a tip from Ashley Beck, a poll worker in conservative Orange County . Listen to her story.  She was being trained with other poll workers, and they were given some very strange information.

“I was told that all NPP [independent] voters are to be given provisional ballots. I was bothered by that, because I was always told that NPP voters in California can vote for Democrats and their vote would be counted.  I was a little worried that he was telling all 18 of us poll workers to give all NPP voters provisional ballots. We all know what happens most of the time with provisional ballots. They are not being counted.”

Provisionally Black

Who gets these placebo ballots?

I was on a book tour in Palm Springs—with an audience of about 200. I asked, “Has anyone here ever gotten a provisional ballot?” The only two Black people in the room both raised their hands, and that was it.

Black people know what provisional ballots are, and they probably know that if they fill one out, the chance of it getting counted is slim.

With the attempt to steal votes by giving independent voters provisional ballots; a lot of white people are being treated as if they turned Black. So to Bernie voters experiencing vote suppression for the first, welcome to the United States of Apartheid voting.

 

Related Podcast:

Greg Palast on the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show

Rent Strikes: ‘together we can defeat the housing market’

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By Matt Broomfield

Source: RoarMag.org

As they revive a long-dormant form of protest, rent strikers in London and San Francisco must learn lessons from the great strikes of the 20th century.

When you can no longer afford to pay your rent, only one course of action remains: stop paying it. On both sides of the Atlantic, tenants are militating against the unbearable pressure of the housing market via the only locus of power available to them — going on rent strike.

Midtown Apartments, San Francisco

Jose LaCrosby was an African-American hair stylist to the stars. Nina Simone, James Brown and Miles Davis all frequented his San Francisco salon. Terminally ill at the age of 89, LaCrosby was told by his doctors that he should return to die among his friends in Midtown Apartments.

But the City of San Francisco had just hiked rents by up to 300 percent. If the Korean War veteran wanted to move back in to a ground-floor apartment it would now cost him $3700 a month. LaCrosby had lived in Midtown for two decades, but he spent the last 7 months of his life under fluorescent lights in an anodyne hospice ward, unable to afford the grossly inflated rent.

LaCrosby’s treatment is symptomatic of the way Midtown is being used as an asset to be stripped for cash, says long-time resident and Save Midtown organizer Jay Majitov. “This community is being displaced by the greed and avarice of property pimps preying on the weak and the disenfranchised,” he explains. Many of Majitov’s neighbors moved into Midtown after being socially cleansed from other areas of San Francisco in the 1960s, on what they understood was a rent-to-buy agreement.

But though Midtown paid off its collective mortgage in 2007, the city reneged on its agreement to hand the building over to the tenants. Instead, Midtowners were hit with a threefold increase in rent, far outstripping the maximum increase set by San Francisco rent controls. Appalled by this betrayal of trust, the tenants of 65 Midtown apartments have been withholding their rent increase since August 2015.

University College London

On the face of it, LaCrosby’s working-class neighbors in Midtown have little in common with the primarily middle-class, primarily white students of University College London. But the price of UCL accommodation has risen by 56 percent in the last six years, and the university extracts £16 million annually in pure profit from their residences. The halls remain shabby, cramped and infested with cockroaches.

As a result, around 150 students are currently striking for a 40 percent rent decrease. “UCL call residents in halls customers, not students,” says David Dahlborn of UCL, Cut The Rent (UCL-CTR). “It’s sheer exploitation.”

There have been rumblings about wider rent strikes across the British left for months, while US activists in Portland and elsewhere are now looking to copy Midtown’s example. Yet until a couple of years ago, no one was talking about rent strikes at all.

The problem(s) with rent strikes

Once a cornerstone of tenants’ rights activism, since the 1980s the rent strike has largely been absent from the arsenal of the left. The most famous rent strike in history occurred in 1915, when the fear of a Bolshevik insurrection forced the UK government to appease strikers in Glasgow by introducing rent controls. As the Communist threat faded after the second Red Scare, so too did the need to form housing policy with one eye on the Kremlin, and the government’s attitude toward rent strikers hardened accordingly.

Given that many rent strikes occurred in mutual relation with industrial strikes, their decline in popularity can partially be ascribed to the decimation of workers’ right to strike by Thatcher and her successors. The UK now loses a tenth as many days to industrial action as it did in the 1980s, and “strike” has become a politically toxic term. (UCL-CTR advise their activists to avoid the word altogether when door-knocking.) The fragmentation of the left and the castration of the trade unions have left Britain without left-wing superstructures capable of amplifying wildcat rent strikes into a broader social movement.

There are also delocalized issues inherent in the mode of protest. The vulnerable people who stand to gain the most from a reduction in rent are also those most imperiled by eviction: working-class people, people of color, single mothers and the disabled, often living in social housing. According to Jay Majitov, many Midtowners will be forced out of state or onto the street if their strike is broken. There is no legal protection for rent strikers in the UK or the USA.

Recrimination can be brutal: after the arrest of rent strikers in Kings’ Cross in 1960, crowds of protesters were baton-charged and violently dispersed by mounted police. Mary Barbour and her army of Glaswegian housewives were forced to fight off heavy-handed bailiffs with wet clothes, rotten food and flour-bombs. Barbour would stomp round the tenements whirling a football rattle to summon her troops as the “factor” moved in.

Midtown property managers Mercy Housing have kept up an aggressive campaign of intimidation, towing residents’ cars for minor infractions and muscling into pensioners’ homes. “They came in as an occupying force, a colonizer. There’s no regard for cultural sensitivity or the long-term tenants,” says Majitov. Tenants have been told they face eviction if their grandchildren visit more than twice a week, or if they hold barbecues on their own property. “I’m sorry, man, but barbecues are what we do,” Majitov adds.

Making rent strikes work

An industrial striker does no work and so loses her pay, but rent strikers actually save money while they agitate, as astronomic rents stop crippling working people and start depreciating from the profits of housing companies. The more unbearable the financial burden on the renters, the keener the loss suddenly felt by the landlord, in an efficacious reversal of power dynamics.

Last year, UCL-CTR organized students from UCL and SOAS in a successful strike, securing £400,000 compensation after the university conceded it had left students in unlivable conditions among cockroaches, rats and incessant building works. London’s first genuine rent strike for 40 years only involved 50 students, but each individual striker made a tangible, measurable impact on the university’s finances. Glasgow 1915 and UCL-SOAS 2015 are century-spanning testaments to the fact that a well-executed rent strike can be devastatingly effective.

Historically, successful mass rent strikes have benefited from a united left providing the infrastructure to exponentially increase the strike’s effect across multiple homes and into the industrial sphere, rather than leaving isolated strikers at the mercy of the bailiffs. A New York strike in 1907 relied on the backing of a strong, active Socialist Party, and the Glasgow strikes would not have succeeded without union support.

As noted above, the male-dominated superstructures traditionally capable of supporting mass direct action have diminished in size and power. If they want to achieve this vital escalation, 21st century rent strikers must look to alternative, grassroots networks of activists.

Alternate support networks

Most successful rent strikes have been led by women. The distinction between rent strikes and industrial strikes should not be collapsed into a crude dichotomy between the male public sphere and the female domestic sphere. In 1907, 16-year-old Pauline Newman led strikes which secured rent reductions for 2000 New York families. She worked till 9pm in a textile factory before campaigning all night in the slums of Manhattan. Working-class women have always worked formally in the marketplace, as well as informally (and unpaid) in the home.

But Newman, the “East Side Joan of Arc”, was supported by housewives who spent the day going from tenement to tenement urging other families to join the strike. Working-class shop-floor networks intermeshed with female-dominated domestic networks. The Glasgow rent strike was sparked by landlords seeking to cow women into submission while their husbands were away fighting in the war. Again, Mary Barbour and her army rapidly spread information through the slums whenever the factor descended, militating via a social infrastructure which their landlords grossly underestimated.

Half of all British housing benefit recipients are single women. The average female flat-sharer in London earns £4236 less than her male counterpart, and twice as many women as men spend over half their salary on rent. Women have a disproportionate stake in the housing crisis, and male politicians continue to underestimate their ability to organize and resist. Though not a rent strike per se, the success of the Focus E15 mothers in resisting eviction attempts by Newham Council illustrates the continued power of localized, female, working-class support networks.

Interlocking working-class communities and communities of color have proven similarly capable of disseminating information and resistance. Rent strikers in 1930s Peckham relied on a rolling guard of unemployed laborers to defend their homes while successfully agitating for an improvement in living conditions. Majitov repeatedly emphasizes the importance of working-class solidarity in Midtown: “We don’t build apps, we don’t code. We drive buses and we deliver mail. And if this working-class community of color hadn’t stood together we would have been out a long time ago. ”

African-American Jean King (another woman) secured rent controls in St Louis after a year-long strike in 1969, while Majitov proudly notes that Save Midtown has the support of civil rights luminary Andrew Young, who successfully organized a rent strike alongside Martin Luther King in 1960s Chicago. Just like in Glasgow in 1907, Save Midtown have appointed tenant organizers with responsibility for contacting strikers across the development, and they are now reaching out to other African-American communities being abused by Mercy to launch a nationwide class action against the housing company.

The university bubble

A rent strike is a very different proposition for students, who are typically more privileged than the general population — a state of affairs maintained by the inaccessible rent conditions UCL-CTR are striking against. Many students have family homes to return to, and this can be leveraged against universities.

David Dahlborn explains: “When nothing had happened by the end of summer 2015, the international students who were on strike said ‘well, fuck it, I’m going home’. The university realized they couldn’t really send bailiffs to Mexico.” UCL capitulated soon after. Again, rent strikes reverse a power dynamic familiar to anyone who has tried to secure the return of a deposit from a suddenly evanescent landlord.

Students can also leverage the disjuncture between the public face of the academic university and its profit-making operations. “They say they’re concerned with education,” says UCL striker Aleksandra Tomaszewska. “But they’ve cut funding and bursaries while raising rent and tuition fees.”

Where housing companies are not hugely concerned with positive public relations, university authorities are at pains to emphasize that they provide a caring, nurturing environment. It would be a PR disaster for UCL to forcibly evict white, well-spoken, middle-class students. As with much student activism, student rent strikers can trade on their privilege to enjoy a much greater degree of security than their counterparts in council housing.

Universities constitute a ready-made network for the expansion of a strike. A successful rent strike at Sussex University in 1972-3 rapidly spread to 23 other universities. UCL-CTR is sharing advice and materials with student activists from SOAS, Imperial and Goldsmiths, as they seek to expand the current rent strike across the capital.

“Anyone could do it,” says Dahlborn, who repeatedly emphasizes the lateral organization of UCL-CTR. “Everybody on the strike is a potential organizer.” Students have more free time than workers; they have access to condensed bodies of left-leaning tenants paying vastly excessive rent; and they are keyed in to networks of information exchange between these bodies.

Rent strikes for the 21st century

Paradigms established by 20th century rent strikers could be instructive for those on the radical left wrangling about their relationship with Momentum and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Newman and Barbour instigated their strikes alone, but willingly worked alongside hierarchical, party-rooted structures to replicate these actions on a wider scale.

But as Dahlborn argues, a successful general rent strike must ultimately emerge from coordinated grassroots action, as multiple localized organizations “replicate and generalize” tactics that have worked well elsewhere. An emphasis on the dispersal of power underpins much recent left-wing strategizing, and rent strikes can operate particularly effectively through decentralized, lateral organization.

“Together we are powerful, and united we can defeat the market,” Dahlborn says. The unity he describes is not monolithic but dispersed, varied and multiple. Strikes should be generated through grassroots networks, not mandated by top-down frameworks.

Networks of university activists provide one such structure. London’s Radical Housing Network, which unites housing co-ops, community action groups and union representatives, is another. (This organization could also facilitate liaison between university students and working-class activists).

Roger Hallam’s concept of “Conditional Commitment” involves assuring potential strikers that a strike will only go ahead once a certain number of other tenants have committed to the action. Successfully implemented by UCL-CTRE, this system of collective responsibility would function well in enabling dispersed networks of rent strikers to operate in unison.

Industrial strikes expose the gulf between the evaluated worth of employees’ labor and the evaluated worth of the products they manufacture. The fact that a rent strike is even tenable as a concept illustrates the fact that tenants, like workers, are treated as profit-making organs.

Historically, the establishment has therefore reacted ferociously to rent strikes, which expose the cruelty of market logic. A general rent strike called by a hypothetical national tenants’ union would likely meet with overwhelming opposition. But it would be much more difficult for the establishment to defeat a network of localized, coordinated strikes breaking out on university campuses and council estates across the country.

Poisoning Black Cities

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They drowned New Orleans. Now they have poisoned Flint, Michigan. The corporate campaign to ethnically cleanse U.S. cities knows no bounds. Michigan’s emergency financial manager law is “part of Wall Street’s tool kit to starve, bulldoze, redline, over-price, oppressively police, and even poison Black people out of the urban centers.”

By Glen Ford

Source: Black Agenda Report

“Michigan’s emergency financial manager system is the lead-tipped point of the spear that is gutting urban Black America.”

It has taken the poisoning of an entire city of 100,000 people – 52 percent of them Black – to draw national attention to the human effects of systematic corporatization of the public sphere under neoliberal U.S. capitalism. Republican Governor Rick Synder promises to “fix” the ruined water infrastructure of Flint, Michigan, now hopelessly corroded and saturated with lead – a repair that could cost as much as $1.5 billion. But, even if Snyder is forced to resign, as demonstrators demand, or is jailed, as filmmaker Michael Moore would prefer, it won’t fix the irreparably damaged brains of the city’s children or prevent a cascade of Flint-like catastrophes from unfolding across the country.

We are experiencing another Katrina moment, a dreadful epiphany in which the nature of the beast that is preying upon us becomes horrifically clear. Michigan’s emergency financial manager system – a weapon of corporate dictatorship imposed selectively on heavily Black and brown cities and school systems – is the lead-tipped point of the spear that is gutting urban Black America. It is not a unique instrument – and certainly not a Republican invention – but part of Wall Street’s tool kit to starve, bulldoze, redline, over-price, oppressively police, and even poison Black people out of the urban centers.

“A Katrina moment.”

Katrina should have been the wake-up call, a decade ago, but the hegemonic influence of the bankster-infested Democratic Party in Black America muted the warning, that the Lords of Capital were determined to eject Blacks from valuable real estate by any means necessary. After their success in expelling 100,000 Black people from New Orleans under cover of a hurricane, the corporate designers of the New American City stepped up the pace of gentrification, deploying every soft and hard tool available to them. The Black-removal machine was revved up to maximum, erasing Black urban majorities and pluralities with dizzying speed.

Having met little organized resistance, the corporate ethnic cleansers grew bolder. Republicans like Rick Synder get elected by trashing Black people; they hardly need an economic motivation for race-baiting. Corporate Democrats are more subtle. Rick Snyder wasn’t the first governor to disenfranchise Black urbanites in Michigan; his Democratic predecessor, Jennifer Granholm, a reputed “liberal,” appointed emergency managers to lord it over mostly Black Benton Harbor, Highland Park, Pontiac, and the Detroit Public Schools (where teachers have been on a sick-out to protest the ghastly conditions wrought by that bipartisan legacy of plantation-like governance).

“The Black-removal machine is erasing Black urban majorities and pluralities with dizzying speed.”

The Obama administration was a full partner in the deal that finalized the bankrupting of Detroit, providing federal funds to protect prime city assets necessary for future “revitalization” (to benefit anticipated new residents) but uttering not a word in protest of the disenfranchisement of the current, 83 percent Black population. The U.S. Justice Department failed to file a brief in support of the local NAACP’s appeal to the federal courts, that Michigan’s emergency financial manager law is racially selective, sparing financially troubled “municipalities with majority-white populations” from financial oversight while negating the votes of more than half of the state’s Black citizenry. “You do not throw out the right to vote on the basis of economic distress,” said Detroit NAACP president Rev. Dr. Wendell Anthony.

On the contrary, that’s exactly what corporations do when they set an economic or political goal that cannot be achieved at the local ballot box: they disenfranchise the uncooperative voters. In the United States, Black votes are the easiest to nullify, because huge numbers of whites don’t think Blacks are worthy of full citizenship. They take pleasure in bringing Detroit low, and in the enforced shrinking of Black New Orleans, never considering that the weakening of democratic norms will ultimately expose whites to the whims of Capital, as well. It is the oldest story in the United States.

“Corporate tentacles encroach upon the traditional powers of ‘too-Black’ cities until there is little left for the local government to tax or administer.”

White racism thus shapes the corporate model for direct rule by moneyed interests. Typically, the urban disenfranchisement process begins with the public schools, which become overwhelmingly Black and brown ahead of the general population. Locally elected inner city school boards are swept away in favor of state or direct mayoral control, while suburbanites retain the old, hands-on democratic model. (The Michigan legislature took over Detroit’s schools in 1999.) Corporate tentacles encroach upon the traditional powers of “too-Black” cities in ways not visible to ordinary citizens – through regional agencies, special industrial and development zones, targeted tax abatements, etc. – until there is little left for the local Black government to tax or administer except its largely impoverished constituents. Black governance is discredited – even though, in the last stages of urban distress, there are few resources with which to govern. The city writhes in protracted pain until “rescued” by the state for the purpose of corporate makeover (“renaissance”) and repopulation.

The corporate rulers and their minions must be held responsible for all of the pain that is inflicted on the people of intentionally distressed cities, whose residents are stripped of the means to defend themselves against the tortures, humiliations and various poisons of the state.

Unaccountable Killer Cops in America

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: Steve Lendman Blog

US streets in minority communities are battlegrounds. The good news is more police killings make headlines though nowhere near as many as warranted. Justifiable public anger is noticeably more visible.

The bad news is cops in America kill innocent (mostly Black) victims hundreds of times annually with impunity.

Activist police brutality critic Sandra Bland was lawlessly arrested after being stopped for a dubious traffic violation. Waller County, TX police lied claiming she assaulted arresting state trooper Brian Encinia. Video evidence showed him harassing, threatening and abusing her.

He opened her car door, aggressively demanded she “(s)tep out of the car.” She justifiably hesitated saying “(y)ou do not have the right to do that. Don’t touch me. I’m not under arrest.”

Encinia threatened her with his taser, saying “(g)et out of the car. I will light you up. Get out. Now. Get out of the car.” Bland was pinned to the ground, assaulted, handcuffed, arrested and jailed. She was found hanged to death in her cell.

A murder investigation is underway. Waller County criminal investigation head Captain Brian Cantrell unjustifiably calls what happened “a tragic incident, not one of criminal intent or a criminal act.”

Systematic police brutality against Blacks in America suggests otherwise. Why would an activist young Black woman commit suicide for any reason – let alone after likely short-term jailing following an abusive traffic stop, a misdemeanor at most if proved she was at fault? Videotape evidence showed otherwise.

Bland participated in rallies against police violence. Prophetically she posted a Facebook comment saying “(i)n the news that we’ve seen as of late, you could stand there, surrender to the cops, and still be killed.”

Was she targeted for her activism? Did State Trooper Encinia stop her for that reason – perhaps knowing he’d assault and arrest her? Was she set up for death? Was Bland assassinated to silence her?

The Texas Department of Public Safety said her arrest “violated the department’s procedures regarding traffic stops and the department’s courtesy policy.”

Encinio was transferred to desk duty. Expect whoever was responsible for Bland’s death to get off scot-free – like virtually always in these type cases.

Independent journalists could write multiple daily articles on horrific police abuse in America – in urban and rural communities, big cities and small, nearly always against disadvantaged people, largely ones of color.

Last Sunday, 43-year-old Black Cincinnati motorist Samuel Dubose was fatally shot in the head by a white officer – inside his car after being stopped for an alleged traffic violation.

On July 19, Hamilton County prosecutor Joseph Deters said “(w)e are investigating what occurred between University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing and Samuel Dubose and we expect to have our assessment complete before the end of next week.”

Dubose was allegedly stopped for missing his front license plate. Authorities notoriously lie. Prosecutor Deters claimed the incident resulted from him struggling with University of Cincinnati officer Tensing.

Unexplained is how (let alone why) with him seated in his car and Tensing outside – unless the officer opened his door and forcibly tried removing him, an act violating police procedure virtually everywhere except perhaps under extraordinary circumstances.

The police account sounded implausible at best. Instead of showing his driver’s license and registration when asked, he allegedly “produced a bottle of alcohol from inside the car, handing it to officer Tensing,” according to university police chief Jason Goodrich.

After an alleged brief struggle, the car rolled forward, knocking Tensing to the ground, he added. He killed Dubose in response.

Whether any of this happened as claimed is dubious at best. Goodrich didn’t say Dubose was drunk – a possible explanation for acting foolishly.

If not, why would he or anyone stopped for an alleged traffic violation hand a police officer a bottle of alcohol instead of his or her license and registration as asked?

Tensing was placed on administrative leave, pending the outcome of an investigation virtually assured to exonerate him.

Another Black man died because killer cops in America have license to kill – including university ones operating by the same anything goes standard as city, state and federal authorities.

Friends and relatives explained Dubose wasn’t a violent man. He was the father of 13, engaged to be remarried. Neighbor Hadassah Thomas said “(e)verybody in the community loved Sam…He didn’t carry a gun, so why did he get shot” for a routine traffic stop?

Police records show Dubose had prior arrests -whether legitimate or not isn’t clear. Black males in America are ruthlessly harassed, falsely arrested, irresponsibly charged and unjustly imprisoned when innocent of any crimes – or very often minor offenses too insignificant to warrant incarceration, like illicit drug possession.

America’s criminal justice system is maliciously unfair. Three convictions for possessing a few grams of cocaine or a single marijuana joint for personal use in three-strikes-and-out states like Texas, California, Florida, Pennsylvania and many others means life imprisonment.

Loot national treasuries and/or steal billions of dollars from duped investors and get off scot-free – or at most receive minor wrist slap fines compared enormous amounts of money stolen not required to give back.

Unknown numbers of mostly people of color wrongfully fester in America’s gulag longterm for capital or other crimes they didn’t commit. Justice is usually available only for those able to afford it.

 

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

The Assassination of Sandra Bland and the Struggle against State Repression

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The Black Lives Matter movement has another martyr, as it prepares for a national conference in Cleveland, this weekend. Sandra Bland’s murder in Texas shows, once again, that “defending one’s dignity in an encounter with the police is a crime that that can lead to a death sentence.” The emerging movement must be clear on the political nature of Bland’s death, and that only real power in the hands of the people can break the cycle of oppression.

By Ajamu Baraka

Source: Black Agenda Report

“Authentic justice and liberation will only come when there is authentic de-colonization and revolutionary power in the hands of self-determinate peoples’ and oppressed classes and social groups.”

During the struggle in South Africa black activists who were captured by the state had a strange habit of jumping to their deaths from the windows of jails and courthouses whenever the authorities would turn their backs. In the U.S. the method of suicide black prisoners appear to choose is death by hanging – that is, when they are unable to pull a gun from an officer and shoot themselves in the chest while handcuffed behind their backs.

In Waller County, Texas, Sandra Bland, a young black woman from Illinois, an activist with Black Lives Matter, who was, according to friends and family, excited about her new job in Texas, is stopped for a minor traffic violation, beaten, jailed and found dead two days later in her cell. Her death is labeled a suicide by the Waller County Sheriff Glen Smith.

Because Sandra Bland was an activist who advised others about their rights and the proper way to handle a police encounter, no one is accepting the official explanation that she took her own life.

What does seem clear is that Sandra was a woman who understood her rights and was more than prepared to defend her dignity. However, for a black person in the U.S. defending one’s dignity in an encounter with the police is a crime that that can lead to a death sentence, or in the parlance of human rights, an extra-judicial execution by state agents.

While many are calling for something called justice for Sandra Bland, we would be doing Sandra and all those who have had their lives taken by the agents of repression a disservice if we didn’t place this case in its proper political and historical context.

“Sandra was a woman who understood her rights and was more than prepared to defend her dignity.”

A psycho-analytic analysis of the dynamics involved with Blands’ gender and blackness could easily conclude that Bland was perceived as an existential threat to the racist male cops who pulled her out of car. Being a conscious, “defiant” black woman she probably disrupted their psychological order and meaning of themselves by her presence and willingness to defend her dignity.

However, as interesting as the individualized analysis and expressions of the psychopathology of white supremacy might be, the murder of Sandra Bland has to be contextualized politically as part of the intensifying war being waged on black communities and peoples across the country.

And because the state is waging war against us and will be targeting our organizations, as an activist, organizer and popular educator, Sandra’s murder must be seen a political murder and receive sustain focus as such.

Coming right before the Black Lives Matter Movement gathering in Cleveland, Sandra’s murder dramatically drives home the ever present dangers of not just being black in a culture of normalize anti-blackness, but the vulnerabilities associated with being a black activist and especially a black woman activist.

Historically the tyranny of white power has always had its most dehumanized expressions in relationship to black women. The unrestrained and unlimited power of white supremacist domination converged on the captive bodies of black women during slavery and has symbolically and literally continued during the post-enslavement period of capitalist/colonialist subordination of black people in the U.S.

“The murder of Sandra Bland has to be contextualized politically as part of the intensifying war being waged on black communities and peoples across the country.”

However, from Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Claudia Jones, Fannie Lou Hammer through to Assata Shukur, Elaine Brown, Jaribu Hill and countless others, revolutionary black women held up the sky and provided the vision of liberation over the ages.

When the South African government began to target black women activists, the popular response was that now the racist government had “struck a rock.”

This week, under the leadership of black woman activists, much of the resistance movement to the escalating violence of the state will gather in Cleveland to engage in reflection and planning. Sandra Bland will be on the minds of those activists as well as Malissa Williams, who found herself at the receiving end of 137 bullets fired by members of the Cleveland police department that ripped apart the bodies of her and her companion Timothy Russell. And the activists will certainly highlight the case of 12 year old Tamir Rice who was shot point blank two seconds after police arrived on the scene where he had been playing with his toy gun in a park near his home.

Yet, the assassination of Sandra must be seen as a blow against the movement. That is why the BLM must struggle to develop absolute clarity related to the political, economic, social and military context that it/we face.

“We understand history and our responsibilities.”

The struggle in the U.S. must be placed in an anti-colonial context or we will find ourselves begging for the colonial state to violate the logic of its existence by pretending that it will end something called police brutality and state killings. The settler-state is serious about protecting white capitalist/colonialist power while we are still trapped in the language of liberal reformism demanding “justice” and accountability. Those demands are fine as transitional demands if we understand that those demands are just that – transitional. Authentic justice and liberation will only come when there is authentic de-colonization and revolutionary power in the hands of self-determinate peoples’ and oppressed classes and social groups.

The martyrdom of Sandra Bland and all that came before her and who will follow – and there will be more – demands this level of clarity. We did not ask for this war. But we understand history and our responsibilities to our history of resistance and our radical vision that we can be more than we are today. Our enemies want us to think that they are invincible but we know their secrets and know that they can be defeated. All we have to do is to be willing to fight.

Ajamu Baraka is a human rights activist, organizer and geo-political analyst. Baraka is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C. and editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is a contributor to “Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence” (Counterpunch Books, 2014). He can be reached at www.AjamuBaraka.com