How about a Campaign for worker ownership and self-management?

I've gone on record in NOT supporting the Campaign for the 15. I have gone on record saying I would not oppose it either. But I am clear why this is a neoliberal rouse, a Trojan Horse that accommodates the status quo and ultimately will be horrible for workers.

I have gone on record saying that workers, trades-unions, and trades-union activists should go back to the heart of their historical campaign as radicals, which was not that long ago - that being, the fulfillment of work-owned, worker-managed enterprises, period and the elimination of private ownership. This what unions stood for initially; anything else was an accommodation with industrial feudalism, and it is an accommodation to settle for a $15 wage when the worker has no more power over their lives from making the current minimum wage, which I will - again - address below.

The entire face of capitalism, globalization, our workplaces, and our communities will change radically as worker ownership and self-management is achieved.

What will the status quo achieve? As one proponent explained how the $15/hr would work in practical terms for a fast-food employee: it would entail fewer employees, he said, and more automation.

Fewer employees, more automation. This is not an innovation. Since the Industrial Revolution, capitalism has sought greater technologies to make more workers superfluous - meaning unemployable.

This Campaign for the 15 proponent speculated that McDonald's would replace the person who takes your order with kiosks, and your order would be transmitted to the actual employee. Start doing the arithmetic.

I have already speculated that as these gentrified, mostly white metropolises will legislate $15/hr wages, the surrounding bantustans, like East LA, would become the location for the underpaid workers.

In either scenario, the Westward march of Manifest Destiny would continue undisturbed.

But our trades-unions have lost a lot of its goals for specific historical reasons, specific historical acts, which removed all radical elements from its ranks. More over, we ourselves have gotten amnesia as to what we used to plainly call a job that intensified ones poverty, not alleviated it: do we have to go back an study the Jim Crow sharecroppers? Do we have to recall the indentured servants?

These cases are readily available, not burned by ISIS/ISIL in faraway places, yet no one in authority is willing to say that a job that cannot afford to pay what is called a "living wage" should not be allowed to exist. It is that simple. The business license of such a business, its act of incorporation should be revoked as being a public menace. This is clear to me, and it should be clear to workers.

The South African government has ordered police to step up efforts to protect foreigners

Lacking any and all background information about South Africa in particular and Africa in general, this is shocking. It also aligns with a script the West seems to follow all over the so-called developed world. In the US, Canada, and many parts of Europe - increasingly the most northern European countries, migrants come in, local whites respond with a range of anti-social behaviors, from white-racist political parties, referenda to throw out nonwhite foreigners, and, yes, bloodletting by "mobs". So these stories from South Africa, framed as they are, digest easily to the Western mind.

But it's all in what the camera frame shows you.

Since the official end of apartheid, Black South Africans have not made any advances despite the country's continued rising wealth. It is this form of State violence - institutional impoverishment and preservation of "order" - that the BBC and the Guardian UK do not cover. The ANC leadership made a deal for the sake of peace and prosperity to end its militant struggle, get apartheid dismantled, open the State to multiparty elections.

The deal allowed whites continued control of the economy and armed forces. This was ostensibly to give South Africa the best of both worlds: open democracy and no white capital flight out of the banks, a Black African electorate with a white establishment.

But this effectively meant that while elections were open to all South Africans, the economy was not. Black South Africans have the vote but continue to be treated as economic refugees in the home of their ancestors. And such is the case in all the most favored African States - favored that is by the UK, France, Spain, and the US, where the economies serve Western interests and the indigenous people of these States continue to be squeezed to death: this is why these Africans - who the BBC stupidly calls "foreigners" -  are fleeing across the Mediterranean to the north, or to South Africa to the south.

Why doesn't the BBC, the Guardian, among other Western papers, cover the extent of failed States across the continent, which are fully supported by Western governments? At most, these news organizations will mock the governments, the presidents for life, the nepotism, but they will never, ever say who this corruption serves. You will never see how these Western-armed, African-led failed-states murder democracy and trades-union activists, using weapons supplied by the UK, France, and the US. These disasters are just sort of presented as natural phenomena.

The one exception to this, I think was reported without any context, when the ANC government of South Africa was shown to be massacring striking coal miners. I do not think it was clarified who owned and profited from these mines and lost profits from the strike - that being the white establishment of the apartheid era.

The ANC government of South Africa has become no better, and just as bad, as any failed State on the continent: and this is exactly the success that the West wants. The people are the threat and if their movements cannot be liquidated, then liquidate the people.

This is the model favored by the West, not popular, grassroots, indigenous movements.

The BBC, the Guardian, and others have not done much coverage of the radicalized movements splintering off from the ANC, like the Economic Freedom Fighters, led by Julius Malema, formerly of the ANC Youth Brigade, from which he was expelled. Malema and the EFF aren't out hunting "foreigners" for bloodsport so the Western news doesn't cover this next stage of South African democratic progressions. Guaranteed were the EFF out shooting other Africans, you would know who Malema was.

So there is a violence on the screen, and it is horrific. But kept out of the camera's angle are the real weapons of death, systems of plunder, and starvation that target the African peoples. It is like a Roman circus, but all you get to see are the slaves in the arena feeding off each other, but you do not see the armed guards circling the arena and the morsels thrown at them by the Roman citizenry. This has been sanitized for your continued ignorance.

This is why I found the BBC line that the South African government was directing police to protect "foreigners" not very funny. The foreigners it is actually protecting are not the ones from Zimbabwe or Malawi. It is a class of thieves.

The camera won't show you who the real foreigners are. Robert Mugabe got it right when he told white squatters on stolen land to "Go back to England."

Cuba, the Summit, and Africans

I'm going through a few media sites covering the Summit of the Americas in Panama. I usually don't bother, but this is the first time the Organization of American States [OAS] has allowed Cuba's participation - meaning, this is the first time the US has allowed it [more on that presently]. Many Latin American countries - to their credit - told the US they would boycott this Summit were Cuba excluded. In 1960, these same countries had expelled Cuba for having a revolution.

In December 2014, Pres. Obama announced re-establishing relations with Cuba, broken after its 1959 revolution. Never a country to take the high road, in the same breath practically, the White House said some stupid things about Venezuela being a threat to the US, and that dissident, anti-Castro groups should also be allowed at the OAS Summit.

To my knowledge, Obama did not invite Occupy Wall Street, the Nation of Islam, BlackLivesMatter, The Huey Newton Gun Club, or the KKK to attend the Summit.

Other creepy things have happened since Obama's December surprise. The US has included a known terrorist in its Summit line-up, a man who was involved in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, trained by the CIA as a killer and anti-Castro subversive, and is credited as the person who pulled the trigger against Che Guevara's head in Bolivia.

Like I said, the US is never one to take the high road.

In many news conferences and interviews, Cuban representatives are demanding the removal of this offensive man. They are reminding us of the US propensity to harbor its own terrorists, like in Miami, who have murdered Cuban civilians, blew up Cuban passenger planes, bombed hotels, etc.

Also, while Obama called for dissident groups to be present at the Summit, various civil society organizations from Cuba, like the Worker's Union, the CTC, have been refused accreditation by the Summit coordinators [read: USA]. Cuban officials have also been interviewed about how blocking these organization a vital aspect of Cuba's development is being left out of panel discussions.

The word "discrimination" was used several times. I agree. Cuban workers should have a voice at the Summit and not only those corporate labor unions.

But what struck me after watching too many clips is this: WHERE IS THE AFRICAN? On my first [and second] trips to Cuba I was struck immediately how African the country is, and yet so far I see no Cuban official of the African diaspora represented in interviews or news conferences, none condemning Che's assassin, none speaking about evolving relations with the US, or noting the "discrimination" behind blocking civil groups from Cuba at the Summit, or none noting overall the Summit is still in the hands of the United States. No Africans from Cuba ... None. Not even in the background!

Over one hundred years ago, before the US entered the Cuban landscape and imposed Jim Crow on the island, the white elite were like other white elites of Latin America: they feared their African majorities and did not want to be known, or, worse, become, another Haiti. Europeans of all classes were invited in en masse in an attempt to counterbalance the Africanness of the Cuban landscape. This white-washing was official policy all over African Latin America.

White men, like Fidel's own father, a poor soldier from Gallicia, Spain, were given as some sort of reparation huge tracts of land: a reparation denied Africans in Cuba who had worked that land for many generations as slaves. From this wealthy start, Fidel was born, while African Cubans remained the lowest part of society.

The Revolution did benefit Africans in Cuba most of all, and in almost every area they showed progress - education, life expectancy, housing. The Revolution did not take two generations of panel discussions and church meetings to undo Jim Crow as the US did: It was immediate. Fidel said he would not betray the revolution's promise. He acknowledged in speeches that Cuba was an "African and Latin" country.

But just as swiftly as the revolution has lost ground since the disappearance of the USSR, Africans in Cuba have fallen further and further behind. As the economy suffocated, white professional Cubans were given lucrative service jobs in the hotels, with access to dollars. I rarely saw an African in a hotel.

But I got harshly schooled one day when a hotel manager, two police, came to fish me out of the hotel pool in Santiago de Cuba. They thought I was Cuban, had trespassed onto the hotel, and had the cojones to go for a swim. I ranted on about apartheid in Cuba, that I could not enter or leave my hotel without being stopped, etc. Using the word "apartheid" seemed to genuinely hurt these Cubans.

Unlike the United States, this poor Caribbean country had since the mid 1960's sent teachers, technicians, and military personnel to help build resistance, anti-colonial, anti-apartheid movements in Africa; to start schools, provide guidance, wage war, sacrifice their lives.

South Africa's apartheid regime, whatever its imperfections today, could not have ended without the intervention of Cuban troops defeating the US-backed racist regime.

What other African-Caribbean country has attempted to do half as much on the continent? None. And they have nominal Africans heading their governments. They are present at the Summit, wearing the costumes of European businessmen, a subtle reminder where their allegiances lay. They have done nothing to address the crimes done to destabilize the African continent; these House Negroes are too busy making Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Belgium their "Mother Country." These heads of state and government are actually no better than the best clowns, peacemakers, and tap-dancers leading our deeply colonized people throughout the diaspora, especially in the US.

Still, I strive to reconcile these two Cubas, if they are in fact distinct, which has made tremendous sacrifice for African liberation but has limits to how this is affected at home. Because it would seem to me that any country, let alone a poor one, who would be so committed to African social justice and sovereignty, would look different domestically.

A Summit of whose America?

The IMF in Africa vs the IMF in Greece

The IMF destroyed fragile nation-states all over Africa in the 80's, and neither they nor Western media heard their complaints.

No one cared that vibrant local economies were decimated by structural adjustment programs [SAP] and austerity measures to drive these countries into the arms of Western finance as neo-slave economies, with low wages, diminished infrastructure like health care, roads, or public development. These programs created huge swathes of refugees. These refugees still roam the earth, poor and landless, looking for a wage and a morsel. These IMF policies are why today there is no domestic mechanism in Africa to face something like Ebola from ravaging the population.

I'll take this indictment further: because of these IMF policies, there was no civil government to face the onslaught of predatory Western pirates who wanted to come in and continue to exploit these African States: the IMF loathes civil government, especially when it comes to peoples who don't know their place, as colonies; and colonies only serve one purpose - to feed and enrich the empires.

A condition of funding a country, the IMF routinely demands the dismantling of democratic institutions, such as public services.

So, because there was no civil government, Western neo-slave drivers could come in and ravage rainforests and landscapes the Africans knew not to touch. Not only were the forests depleted for mining, but a certain species of bat lost its habitat and flew, like another refugee, into populated areas: this bat, like the monkeys before, carried a certain microbe incompatible with humans. HIV, Ebola, and the gods-only-know what else is being unleashed just so Western capital can dig up some minerals, or natural gas, or whatever is of such worth to them that humans beings and their civil society must be eradicated to get to it.

Please read that again.

There was no 24-hour death watch on the news as this happened, no coverage of the democracy movements in these African countries who were pleading for air while the IMF noose was being tightened around their necks, no sexed-up feature of the leadership of the insurgent political parties or civil society movements. No, such things seem reserved for Greece.

But we all knew what the IMF was doing back in the 80's. The imperialist's own social scientists documented the "successes" of these measures in their journals and made ample coursework of it for undergraduates in the leading research universities.

So when the IMF chief claims ignorance how their policies have badly affected Greece, I am genuinely truly puzzled. I smell an imperialist. Since there is ample documented evidence what their policies do and their hatred for civil government as a frontal threat to Western financial interests, where is this mea culpa coming from?

Could it mean SAP and austerity are not intended for European audiences? I doubt it. Europeans will kill their own for profit as readily as they have killed Africans if it means turning a dollar into gold.

Speaking of blood and treasure, a lot went in to unifying Europe as an economic entity. Bismark started it in imperial Germany. Hitler accelerated the plan. And even when Hitler's body was still warm in the cellar, Europe regrouped after a disastrous war to solidify the dream of a "Common Market".

Maybe, just maybe Europe can do without Greece, but it cannot do with the precedence of an upstart member breaking free on its own. Spain and Ireland are sure to follow. The UK, too, for different, more nationalistic reasons.

Collectively, the former Christendom has despite its shrinking population offered a force to maintain its colonial relations. In case you missed that lesson, the colonial relationship is Europe, nothing more or less. It is not Nordic industriousness or German ingenuity or the island of shopkeepers or the French bourgeoisie. Europe was built by mercenaries, pirating what loot, bodies, and treasure they could from the other parts of the world.

This is why Africa may go to Hell as long as its resources are kept intact, but Greece warrants special attention. And this is why the IMF chief has come out with crocodile tears about what went wrong ... in Greece.