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The US ruling class is skilled in flattering and cultivating leaders. It presses its own image on them and finally, from imitation of manners, dress and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of union leader acquires the boss’s contempt for the ordinary worker. He is often more at home with the employers than he is among his own people. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from a workers’ representative to the boss into the employer’s representative to the workers. The tragedy has happened so often that these union leaders now acknowledge that they are in partnership with the boss/ruling class. — Paraphrase of Martin Luther King’s, The Black Power Defined
Negro leaders suffer from this interplay of solidarity and divisiveness, being either exalted excessively or grossly abused. Some of these leaders suffer from an aloofness and absence of faith in their people. The white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders. It presses its own image on them and finally, from imitation of manners, dress and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of Negro leader acquires the white man’s contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at home with the middle-class white than he is among his own people. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white man’s representative of the Negro. The tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him. — The Black Power Defined, Martin Luther King Jr. 1967
There are other issues, but I’ll just stick with these for the time being. The main point I want to convey is Colin Kaepernick is a young man of conscience who is doing something valuable that could cause him great “loss”. He risks the loss of endorsements, his position as a professional athlete and the vilification of white America. The good news is his stand is gaining ground with other NFL players. Now the NFL is going to have to balance the line of respecting his First Amendment rights with their need to keep their white patrons satisfied. Lost in all of this is the fact the man who wrote the Star Spangled Banner was a successful lawyer, a slave owner and an influential founder and life long supporter of the American Colonization Society an organization created in 1816 whose goal was to send free Blacks back to Africa, the Caribbean or South America. Key remained a faithful advocate of the ACS until his death in 1843. . . . Most people have no idea how racist the song’s lyrics are since they usually only sing the first verse. This is third verse’s words “And where is that band who so vauntingly swore That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion, A home and a country, should leave us no more? Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave: And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave, — Junious Ricardo Stanton, Colin Kaepernick vs Francis Scott Key
Video of the Day:
U.S.
Ongoing/Big Energy Disasters:
At the Very Least, Your Days of Eating Pacific Ocean Fish Are Over The heart-breaking news from Fukushima just keeps getting worse…a LOT worse…it is, quite simply, an out-of-control flow of death and destruction. TEPCO is finally admitting that radiation has been leaking to the Pacific Ocean all along. and it’s NOT over…. I find myself moving between the emotions of sorrow and anger. It now appears that anywhere from 300 to possibly over 450 tons of contaminated water that contains radioactive iodone, cesium, and strontium-89 and 90, is flooding into the Pacific Ocean from the Fukushima Daichi site everyday. To give you an idea of how bad that actually is, Japanese experts estimate Fukushima’s fallout at 20-30 times as high as as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings in 1945 There’s a lot you’re not being told. Oh, the information is out there, but you have to dig pretty deep to find it, and you won’t find it on the corporate-owned evening news.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
A Story Too Often Untold: Lowndes County, the Voting Rights Act, and the Birth of the Original Black Panther Party When 1965 began, African Americans in Lowndes County, Alabama could not vote. The county, which was 80% black, had 5,122 eligible black voters, but not a single one was registered. Denied the ballot, African Americans had no say in the political process. There were no black elected officials and there hadn’t been one since Reconstruction. And no blacks sat on juries, since jury pools were derived solely from lists of registered voters. By Hasan Kwame Jeffries
On Page 602, A Testament of Hope: the essential writings and speeches of Martin Luther: Martin Luther King stated the course that he was planning to take in the fight for economic equality: The Emergence of social initiatives by a revitalized labor movement would be taking place as Negros are placing economic issues on the highest agenda. The coalition of an energized section of labor, Negroes, unemployed, and welfare recipients may be the source of power that reshapes economic relationships and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform. . . . He continues on Page 631: There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum — and livable — income for every American family. There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid, or day laborer. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peaces will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a true brotherhood. . . .
Now about injunctions: We have an injunction and we’re going into court tomorrow morning to fight this illegal, unconstitutional injunction. All we say to America is, “Be true to what you said on paper.” If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, MAYBE I COULD UNDERSTAND SOME OF THESE ILLEGAL INJUNCTIONS. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they HAVEN’T committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for RIGHTS. And so just as I say, WE AREN’T GOING TO LET ANY DOGS OR WATER HOSES TURN US AROUND, we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. — Martin Luther King, Jr. I’ve Been to the Mountaintop, Memphis 1968
A Tale of Two Sanitation Workers Strike
Memphis 1968: Martin Luther King Supports Strike:
20th Anniversary of Clinton’s War Against the Poor: It’s been 20 years since President Bill Clinton and the U.S. Congress destroyed “welfare as we knew it” by replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with the “workfare” regime called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The result, said Maureen Taylor, chairperson of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, is growing poverty in the United States. Taylor says TANF should be changed to DANF, standing for “Disappearing Aid for Needy Families.” Residents of Michigan are only eligible for cash assistance for five years in their lifetimes. It’s a shame, said Taylor, how the political class is “turning, not against poverty, but trying to turn the nation against poor folks.”
Judge Finds Way to Avoid Ordering Hep C Cure for Mumia: A federal judge agreed that it is unconstitutional for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to deny curative medical treatment to Mumia Abu Jamal and thousands of other prisoners suffering from Hepatitis C. However, the court then ruled that Abu Jamal’s suit was technically flawed. Noelle Hanrahan, a director of Prison Radio who works closely with Mumia, was outraged that the state has condemned thousands of prisoners to early and unnecessary deaths. “You can’t construct a situation that is more grossly inhumane,” she said. Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner, was more upbeat about the ruling. “It’s a good beginning that a federal judge recognizes that what the Commonwealth is doing, and has been doing for years, is not only unjust but unconstitutional, a violation of fundamental fairness and the human right to life,” he said.
Clinton and Trump Fear TV Debate with Stein and Johnson: “Our view is that if you have the potential for 270 Electoral College votes — if you are on enough ballots to achieve that — then you should be in the debate,” said Kevin Zeese, the veteran activist recently named as senior advisor to the Green Party’s Jill Stein-Ajamu Baraka presidential ticket. Zeese notes that polls show half the American public wants the televised debates open to Stein and Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate. However, the debates are a joint venture of the Democratic and Republican parties, who call the shots. “It’s a disgrace to democracy,” said Zeese, “that they can choose who they will debate.”
Obama Neutralized Blacks for Most of His Term: Barack Obama’s presidency has been “the highest expression” of the U.S. government’s long campaign to “neutralize the Black liberation movement,” said BAR regular contributor Danny Haiphong, who this week posted the ninth in his ten-part series on the Obama legacy. “It really wasn’t until 2014, when Obama was in his last years, that any semblance of a movement against issues like police brutality and racism began to come back to the fore,” said Haiphong. Black liberationist politics has been suppressed for two generations, said Haiphong, “with the help of a Black misleadership class that has diluted, sanitized and almost destroyed, up until recently, the Black Radical Tradition.”
U.S. Anti-War Movement Under Attack: A recent article by Terry Burke in the leftish magazine In These Times attacked a broad range of anti-war activists and groups for opposing the U.S. war against Syria. Burke claims U.S. activists aren’t listening to “the Syrian people.” In response, Sara Flounders, of the United National Anti-War Coalition, said the U.S. insists on regime change in Syria, and “anyone who has any confusion as to where that leads has only to look at Libya and at Iraq and see the howling wasteland that has been created” by U.S. intervention.
Labor:
South Africa: The local government elections – a shift in the political landscape The recent local government election results represent a decisive shift in the South African political landscape. It comes in the wake of years of ferocious class struggle in which all the contradictions of South African society have come to the surface in an explosive way. The result of these elections provides us with a snapshot into this process in which the collective mood of anger, frustration and disillusionment among the masses are the dominant features. The outcome of the elections has significantly altered the situation. The decline in support for the African National Congress (ANC) has left behind a fractured political terrain. by Ben Morken
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
The System is A Terrorist!
Quotes of the Day:
Environment:
Atlanta: First Black Democratic Mayor Breaks Strike: A disgrace before God: Striking black sanitation workers vs. black officialdom in 1977 Atlanta This article is a case study of the betrayal of the African American working class by the Black political class brought to power by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960’s.
Black Agenda Report for Week of September 7, 2016
Economy:
World: