The Counter Narrative to the Refugee Crisis

Resist this constant narrative about "refugees." Usually when US media stick to a singular message, I can simply go to the Guardian UK, Le Monde, El Pais, or other European media to get an alternative view. In this case, all the usual suspects - US, UK, Germany, France, and of course NATO - are complicit in perpetrating their customary war crimes - customary in the history of imperialism, that is. So it's not only valuable to question the message but also look outside to Russian, Cuban, and Indian media, or the truly dissident media within the empires, for another angle.

What is being driven into our heads as a refugee crisis, who will take the refugees, how many will they take, the plight of the refugees, the angst of such leaders as British prime minister David Cameron, who is said to be restricted by a British electorate leery of immigration, or of German chancellor Angela Merkel, who is described as facing down the skeptics in her ruling coalition - all this, all this rhetoric, misses some obvious points right in front of us.

One obvious fact is this refugee crisis is the result of a massive arms build up by the imperial powers in Western Asia over oil.

The other has to do with the economic state of Europe.

The West was literally built by its access into the global South via forced labor camps [plantations] and resource theft to fuel the industrial revolution. As these resources diminish, the need to secure access becomes more critical: hence, the massive tonnage of weaponry being used in the region, something almost never talked about, and where these weapons come from; hence in what Western commentators call generations of peacetime since the end of World War II. we have actually seen an almost constant, sustained imperial war on the global South.

The masses of people of the global South have simply gotten in the way of easy access to this shrinking, global oil supply. People are a threat because they pose potential forces of resistance, violent and nonviolent, revolutionary or not revolutionary.

The Cherokee got in the way, so they had to be made into refugees. East African tribes are in the way, so they are made into refugees. And in the closest analogy to our present situation, the Vietnamese peasants got in the way, so defoliants were used to drive masses of potential revolutionaries from the countryside where they were self-sufficient and  into the cities where they would become solely dependent on the US-backed dictatorship.

And then there is Europe itself.

What is puzzling about this refugee narrative is everyone seems to assume, and the refugees are made to assume, there is a home for them in Europe. I don't know what psychotic one must take to believe this: Europe, which has done so poorly in assimilating its colonial Asians, Africans, Arabs is presumed today to have a home for these hundreds of thousands of refugees, when just one Brazilian laborer could be assumed to be an Arab terrorist and chased by plainclothes secret service agents and shot multiple times in the London tube [subway].

Europe, which has deeper problems which connect directly to capitalism, is supposed to have economies to absorb these hundred of thousands of people.

Even without these refugees, with every advancement in Europe and growth in the British FTSE or German banks, comes deeper unemployment among its own peoples. This phenomenon is certainly true of the US and the rest of the industrialized world, guided by a command economy directed by bankers and financiers. Rising markets seem in competition with rising surplus laborers for whom there is no work and moves to lessen social supports.

Europe is in a crisis, and we see this most clearly in the southern regions and Ireland.

What is to be done with several hundred thousand refugees, regardless of their technological skills, when Europe cannot absorb its own into its narrowing economy? This is why the poorer EU countries are loudest in their resistance to accept these people.

Neoliberalism is supposed despite the evidence to the contrary right in front of us to solve every problem and put a chicken in every pot. These are lies. Vicious, imperial lies.

The Campaign of Kim Davis

As incredible as it might seem, it should not surprise you that some circles of so-called radical thinkers - mostly white, as far as I can tell - have made Kim Davis a cause close to their hearts.

We follow our white allies into deeper pits when even elected public servants who refuse to follow the law - particularly in regards to civil rights - are worthy of defense. I'm reading the strangest interpretations of Marxism applied to Davis. I see her given that militant-era right to with hold her labor that our labor force sorely needs to revive. I read that she has free-speech rights and this judge is abridging these rights, that her action in denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples was non-violent, so why feed the prison system with her body.

I have come to suspect their usefulness as allies. Now I wonder about their sanity.

Kim Davis is on a campaign. It is a political campaign. It has very little to do with Christianity since this country is not really a Christian country: she believes she is defending the settler state, and that the settler state is founded on the contrived unit of a nuclear family of heterosexuals. Her campaign is no more religious and no different than that of the Israelis who defend their settler state under the thin guise of Judaism. The Davis campaign is to use her occupation of a political office to stop a decided civil right.

She is not worth my sympathies or my defense. She's certainly not worthy that I draw from my radical anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-police state readings to defend her.
I will never defend the rights of Nazi camp guards over the captive Jews, gypsies, and queers.

If the job for which she was elected no longer meets her standards, and she wants to fuck white Jesus as her fifth husband, she was free to quit her job before being sent to jail.

She refuses to do so because she may not be the last Confederate widow, but she is one of many. Again, she is on a campaign much like any of her peers in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, Israel, or Northern and Southern Rhodesia.

What Davis is oblivious to is that these same-sex couples clamoring at her office door for marriage licenses are more her allies than her foes. They want their place in the settler state; they don't want to interrogate it, dismantle it, revolt it into the rubbish bin of history. Same-sex marriage is more her ally than knows, and its adherents are more likely to kneel at the tomb of the same white Jesus she claims to hold so close to her bosom.

They will not be interrogating how our national institutions created the so-called Appalachian region, with its abject poverty of white people. The coal mines. The sabotage against union organizing.

What I expect is happening for these fake radicals may seem ripped from the pages of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing: it is that these white radicals cannot stomach seeing a white woman punished the way Africans, First Nations, and Arabs are routinely treated without the meandering outcries of these same radicals.

Ali Amin, aged 17, has just been sent to prison for 11 years, and I hear nothing from these tongue-twisters about free speech or needlessly filling our prisons. Nothing.

As far as I'm concerned, if this circle of white radicalism can defend Davis, they can defend the settler state, and they are no ally of mine.

Brief Thoughts on the Imprisonment of Ali Shukri Amin at 17

 

Seventeen year old Ali Shukri Amin has just been sentenced to 11 years in prison, as an adult, for "supporting" ISIS. I listened twice to the news story this morning on NPR. A US Attorney made a point of going in person to the studio to be interviewed, which alerts me that the Feds are intent on making a grand example of this young man. The Feds are making the rounds to massage the reporters.

I listened carefully to the interview. The reporter asked a few times about this "support," and I leaned in. I don't understand how having a Twitter account [with 4,000+ followers] supporting the ISIS mission or helping a friend go to Syria or even encouraging others warrants a terror charge and an 11-year sentence in a white-settler country where the Klan thrives, in the open, in most states, and its former Grand Wizard, David Duke, walks freely and commentates in his reactionary fashion about US politics.

Looking further into this case, it is reported that Amin is an honor student at his high school, described various times as un-assimilated among his peers, which is code to many of us peoples of color. He immersed himself in the internet and online discussions. It is not surprising, however it happened, that such a person in such a country, would begin to look to the lands of his ancestors for the spiritual nourishment denied him by being "un-assimilated."

In any case, Amin's parents, concerned for him, elicited the help of a local imam to counsel the boy.

The imam, it is now reported, is an FBI informant. From there and from that, things went predictably downhill to this then-16 year old kid having the weight of his mosque [headed by the informant], the FBI, and the Federal courts upon him.

Who could take that pressure without folding, which is what Amin did, in exchange for a lighter indictment? He's written a pitiful letter to the court, worthy of a Soviet-era apology.

The case of Ali Amin, and the resources put towards punishing this boy reveals how far, how wide, how deep the US plays its role in the imperial wars on Western Asia (aka, the Middle East). They have plucked a mere child from the soil, who fired no weapons, dropped no cluster munitions.

Since the US has shown itself to be that desperate, I reiterate the hopelessness of its cause. It must know how badly it's losing.

This is not a source of joy but of alarm. Europe and its spawn have shown themselves to be capable of the most brutal genocides to prop up its culture.

Meanwhile, it is not Amin but Kim Davis, the jailed public official in Kentucky, who has become a Cause for a strange circle of white leftist radicals who are disturbed that her "free-speech rights" have been violated; that, recalling the more militant trades-unionism, she has a "right to with hold her labor;" and somehow they allege Marx is spinning in his grave at her ill-treatment and the prison-industrial complex.

Strange things are coming from their mouths.

It is always revealing - as if we need more evidence - what our so-called white allies select as their causes, and those things they pretend not to see at all.

What have you done to Celia?

Coming this Fall 2015. To Telemundo. Hold your breath. Given the clips I've just watched, I already have reservations about "Celia," a multi-episode series of her life. Anyone who knows me well knows I DREAM about Celia Cruz. I have all her recordings. Read about her and read her "autobiography," which must be put in quotations as it has proven to be as reliable as Katharine Hepburn's ME: Stories of My Life - something disseminated from the old PR departments of MGM.

Telemundo's choice of the title role, a Puerto Rican actress of a certain light hue, shows me we've not come far since that Latino comedian made a vile, racist remark about Michelle Obama looking like a monkey. "Latin America," to use that erroneous term for the moment, is more color struck, more obsessed with the brown-bag tests than their counterparts among the Yankees. Ok, they are equally obsessed. They are all cut from the same cultural cloth that is racist Europe.

From the clips, the Cuban revolutionaries look like fanatics; but no hint in the preview that Celia herself was a fellow-traveler of the communists and twice during the 1950's was barred from entering the US with her band for being so [as US State Dept documents released after her death revealed].

I wonder why the long-planned project between Whoopi Goldberg, a feeble mind but decent actress, Cristina Saralegui, and her husband could never be greenlit. Goldberg is not conventionally Latino but she has the coloring and the African body to contrast the actress Telemundo has chosen. Just over 10 years after La Reina's death, it is jarring to see a lighter-skinned, Vogue-bodied woman portray a particular AFRICAN. The light-skinned Puerto Rican plays the younger Celia, while Cuban singer, Aymée Nuviola, another African of Cuban nationality, is reported to play the role of Celia later in life. Nuviola is a force of Nature as a musician in her own right. She would not have had a voice dub her singing parts, and as a sonera - improviser - she is in a league of her own. Yet it will be jarring to see even her play the role of a dark-skinned African in a racist Spanish society.

Haila Mompié, a dark-skinned African singer of Cuban nationality, would have been a wise choice as the young Celia. Haila, as she is known professionally, even produced a tribute CD to Celia in Cuba [that could not attribute itself to Celia]. It is a beautiful rendition of Celia's classics. Like Goldberg, she seems not to have been an obvious choice.

But this is why the term Latin America needs, at minimum, unpacking. In white hands, it pretends to be many things, but never African. It lauds in romantic tones the indigenous communities it continues to exterminate. It holds up Spain or Portugal as Mother Countries, or views a British-German woman as their queen, when its populations are in no way British, German, Spaniard, or Portuguese: its rulers have been.

It is just as if we called Algeria French or Rhodesia British, when 80%-90% of its populations were African in the lands of their ancestors. We really must stop and look at these crimes.

I have been unpacking the Latin American/Caribbean region. Like historian Ali Mazrui, I would consider much of the Caribbean literal extensions of Africa, due solely to Europe intervention in the kidnapping of Africans and the total extermination of the native populations; and the region's whitened minority populations, recent imports to stave off another Haitian revolt and solidify white supremacy, a European counter-measure.

Just as I would look at other parts of the Latin American region as categorical First Nations, indigenous, despite the European governments and landowners in power.

Here I go further: brainwashed and white-washed peoples of the region, including Africans who should know better, might argue they are "all Cuban. Just Cuban," or, "just Mexican," "Brazilian," and so forth and so on, despite what their own racist governments do in practice: and I do include the Cuban revolution here. For a country overwhelmingly African, the absence of African leadership is telling.

Nationality has replaced religion as an opiate of the African masses in the diaspora: false flags and passports, when our condition is predictable and indices common from New York City to the southern tip of Brazil, and then some. Since our services were rendered useless at the end of chattel slavery, our presence has been a constant problem best solved by national campaigns to shoot us, lock us up, malign us at every turn in the popular press. Most attempts to actualize us, show our history, or condition, are silenced. That is why I believe Goldberg's project was vetoed and no one ever seriously considered Haila to play Celia.

Looking at the previews of "Celia," our masters really haven't come far from those times of the 40's, 50's and into the 1960's when African musicians could not be shown on their own record albums nor plays on mainstream - read, white - radio stations. They needed the likes of Pat Boone and Elvis to cover African music, and thus, stars were made and talent erased. "Celia" is on a long continuum of propaganda to erase Africa and its gifts.

On Prisons

 

With Obama being the first sitting president to visit a prison to talk about mass incarceration we must be careful how he and the white press - for that is whom he is really speaking for - confine the discussion why the United States is purportedly the biggest prison population in the world

The Establishment is a odd mix in and of itself, so it is redundant to note a figure like Newt Gingrich on the so-called Right and a personage like Van Jones on the so-called Left finding common cause around this issue of our prisons. We are assaulted with this narrative that "all sides" have come together and agree that the US prison population is a problem in need of resolution.

The Establishment always agree. There is nothing extraordinary here. What is extraordinary is the level of gullibility among some viewers.

The Establishment agree on a defense budget. The Establishment agree that Israel is "our" friend. When Rep Barbara Lee [D-Calif] voted to send more weapons of death to Israel after that white-settler state had killed a few thousand Palestinians in Gaza, she was acting as part of the Establishment. 

 

She not only had none of her leftist flourishes to offer as excuse but she also notably went into hiding from the left-wing press.

Even Sen. Bernie Sanders votes to support Israel, and he has been heckled at events for doing so, to which he gets irate and flustered.

So, if anything, the Establishment agreeing on anything should not warm your heart but arouse you to pay closer attention, which is what I'm doing now.

 

The gullible eat the shit in their words and don't watch how these people in government vote.

If you believe the narrative coming out you'd think the country had stumbled mistakenly into this predicament of a swelling prison system. You'd think that it was the consequence of a competitive party system trying to better their opponent on getting tough on crime.

The subtext of this is supposed to convey they it was never intended to lock these masses of African, First Nation, and poor white people up for prolonged sentences: it was just a mistake.

So given this official narrative, that racist Arkansian, Bill Clinton, can credibly come out as offer his regret for signing Omnibus Crime Bills, sending tens of thousands into the dungeons.

What's a prison population for? I'm less interested that ours in the US is the biggest, because prisons function the same whether in the UK, China, France, or Equatorial Guinea.

Prisons house human beings the system cannot absorb.

Parts of the US and all of Australia were started as Convict Colonies, and this fact gives us a sense of prisons and what we really need to do to abolish them.

Britain sent the refuse of capitalism outside its borders. They had already filled up the system within its borders. Refuse of capitalism? Yes. In seeking primarily to maximize profit - not save the world or turn lights on, but rather make money - capitalism wants to deal with as few workers as possible and pay them as cheaply as it can manage. The technology sphere in the hands of capitalism will aid capitalism by finding ways to make workers - human beings - more and more superfluous. Refuse.

Technology is not in itself an evil. Writers who should have known better theorized technology would come to make our lives easier, would create a leisure class. These writers were living in a fantasy world and seemed unaffected by the sober writings that ran almost since the beginning of the so-called Industrial Age right up to, say, Huey Newton's discourses in the 1970's.

Capitalism has made people refuse to a system that has no use for them. It makes sense that one of the earliest populations to be affected by this in the US white settlement were freed Africans.

Since the slave system was demolished, the main problem this white-settler nation has had is what to do with Africans. It has been a running, enduring, persistent problem only solved by - that's correct - mass incarceration.

Discussion about the crimes committed is important because they are clearly racial in nature: in other words, they were crafted to target specific populations. But this present hand-wringing that maybe the sentences for this or that were too excessive or why or why not to mandatory minimums or we need to rethink how many strikes a convict might get is a big distraction from the Plot.

Capitalism wants a smooth, green golf course, and these surplus workers are weeds. It doesn't matter to the Establishment if it can get away with shooting them, gassing them, spraying Round-Up on them, lynching them, pulling them out by their roots, whatever.

It's important the prison problem be framed this way for two apparent reasons:

One, it points to the obvious solution, and it is not getting rid of three-strikes laws but a system that is profit-centered in the first place.

Two, it's important to look at the obvious solution because the Establishment will not come to this solution itself. I would not expect them to. So what are they going to do? What are they up to?

Another recent hand-wringing might give us a worrying clue.

Remember when that same phony Left-Right coalition lamented an over-extended military? They meant personnel, not weapons of death. They targeted personnel and bases, not missiles and cluster-bombs. At any rate, what was the result of this draw-down of the military? It was private contractors. It was a means for the government to lower government expenditures.

Private contractors, who replaced government employees, were like temps: they weren't government employees, not military service people, so any extraneous costs - like long-term medical - were eliminated.

The mission of empire never, ever changed. It has not changed. As with this post-Industrial move to privatize our public schools, local and state government, and right up to what I see as a move to make a great leap forward to privatize the prison system.

This is where we are headed.

Maintaining a large and, in my opinion, naturally revolutionary cadre, of prisoners has become a cost the austerity government does not want to bear. That is why the current preoccupation with our prisons, which is not about prisoners, never about workers.

That is why you will never hear as a cause for incarceration the de-industrialization of the country in favor of cheaper labor abroad and how this would naturally devastate an urban or rural community. The Establishment don't want you connecting any dots.

In the same vein, the Establishment for all its current bluster is not about to release this cadre - which I emphasize is probably the most revolutionary we have, less wedded to a bourgeois system and without bourgeois aspirations - into the streets. They are about to hand the prison system over to the same companies running our charter schools.

Dickens cannot be far behind.

The Greek Referendum

I'm holding my breath on this mistaken referendum in Greece. But I never take my eyes off the evil-doings of Western finance in every part of the world, especially resource-rich, yet impoverished Africa.

Greece was imposed with a Danish monarchy as the Ottoman Empire began its decline. The present Greek king, who is not Greek, is, as he should be, at home in London. Exiled. Yet he still maintains fantasies of returning to his "homeland" where he is not wanted.

Prince Philip, the British queen's husband, was supposedly a Greek prince. The former queen of Spain, Sofia, wife of the also unwanted Juan Carlos, was also a Greek princess. Juan Carlos was imposed on the Spanish people by Franco, and SYRIZA's counterpart in Spain, PODEMOS, wants to exile its monarchy too. In any case, neither Philip nor Sofia have an ounce of Greek blood but come from Denmark and Germany - Germany, which used to be called the stud farm for Europe's royals [because Europe had so recklessly intermarried, spawning some bizarre characters it needed to find some fresh, white blood].

During World War II German NAZI occupation, resistance movements spring up all over Europe. Perhaps the weakest of these, but most celebrated today, was in France. Why? Because the French loved Hitler and Nazism. But since Hitler lost, the ridiculed French resistance has become legendary.

Not so in Greece. The Greek Resistance was large and deep. It was so anti-fascist, so well organized, so well disciplined, so strong, so believing in civil society and democracy, so socialist and so deeply anti-colonial that it had to be liquidated by the British and a military government imposed, along with sustaining the Danish royals.

The Greek Resistance fighters caught on to this quickly and planned to euthanize Churchill as the sick dog he was.

SYRIZA, that anti-austerity, anti-capitalist political party, must know this history. Taking real power through an election is naive enough and comes with known difficulties: namely, you are given the tools and restrictions of a capitalist state to implement non-capitalist agenda.

But to trust a second referendum tomorrow without European imperialism intervening in the most bloodthirsty way, given the history, makes me hold my breath ...

if Europe will sleep soundly knowing that young Greeks are throwing themselves off ledges to end their suffering, you must know this same Europe will PUSH Africans off the same ledges.

I got your back, Miss Simone

Cautionary Tales are a widely used device in Western art forms to take real or imaginary lives and explain [or imagine] their crash-and-burn demise as a warning to us all: beyond here be dragons. I became aware of the wide use of this device reading Gore Vidal's narratives and counter-narratives about some scholar taking down a militant or - to use Vidal's tongue-in-cheek - "the fags." Oscar Wilde comes to mind as someone scholars kept churning out cautionary tales about sex, and Vidal was ready in the wings to take the muthafucka down. And he did so quite beautifully, which is why I was always riveted to read his prose. I recommend it.

So I approach any biographical work with suspicion: what is the task of the artist or producer?

This suspicion is reflexive if the subject matter is any one of official outcasts of this pretended, wicked white settler society and its false prophet white Jesus.

I only knew some of Nina Simone's music and less of what others might have mentioned in their own works. Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Kwame Ture come immediately to mind. My general impression was here was an articulate, angry voice to articulate the human rights crimes of the United States, when the nation did not welcome neither articulation nor anger. Just compliance.

So even without being an African woman, she came to me as an outcast.

Still, I was eager and anxious to see the documentary about her life, ""What Happened, Miss Simone?" to see if it filled in the many gaps of my knowledge without giving the usual Cautionary Tale.

Gaps were filled. One of Malcolm's daughters articulates what is truly wrong with this Christian country when she says: "Participation in activism during the 60's rendered chaos in any individual's lives. People sacrificed sanity, well being, life. Nina Simone was a free spirit in an era that didn't appreciate a woman's genius. What does that do to a household and a family, not because of [lack of] income but because your soul not being able to do what you need it to do ... "

Nina. Jimmy. Josephine. WEB. Stokely. Geromino. Did these luminaries find the secret to persisting by emigrating and avoiding the academic oblivion and baby talk that other African radicals faced when they stayed here on Turtle Island too long and blended like American cheese into the tasteless casserole that is the United Snakes of America? [Thank you, Nina, for that: I will use it liberally from now on].

Nina escaped to Liberia, is described as being happy, but inexplicably ends up in Europe where she is medicated and given an ultimatum to resume her career. I wanted to hear MORE about those eight years in Liberia!

These, I guess, are the facts, whether I like them or not.

So if there is a Cautionary Tale here is it to not wander too far off the reservation? Simone is described by her contemporaries as "sacrificing" so much to the slave rebellion [aka, civil rights movement]; that she was no longer marketable; that she scared record labels and soured radio stations. I couldn't help thinking the handlers of this project see life as a linear existence, not circuitous, where one body of water meanders to feed another.

In real life, school teachers can become salsa music sensations, Ivy League pre-med students can "drift" into a stellar acting careers, and young, well-married attorneys can become one of the greatest revolutionaries of our time.

Such are the nonlinear trajectories of Celia Cruz, Katharine Hepburn, and Fidel.

The idea that any of them betrayed their destiny or needed medicating to stay the Course would be troublesome.

Nina said and wrote what she meant, how she felt, and what she was inspired to do: and she was crushed at every turn not only by her country's elite but by people who said they were her husband and "brother."

Maybe the first thing revolutionaries must do is kill their friends. If that is too extreme, the words of Jesus rejecting his blood family might substitute as a non-violent mantra.

To do neither is to risk one's sanity.

The Cautionary Tale needs to be coaxed out of this documentary project. On her way through a music career, Eunice Wayans was destined to join Assata in leaving the Black Panthers because they weren't militant enough and taking up arms with the Black Liberation Army. If they had been caught and jailed in New Jersey, they'd have broken each other out, and fled to Cuba. Miss Simone wrote that her husband could not satisfy her sexually: this better course would have given her the orgasms she so craved.

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.

Stuck between a Rock and a Bantustan

Aloha from the US-occupied nation of Hawaii. I think language is important, not only as a writer but also as a person who strives to have a grip on reality. So, like I think it's important to call Africans on the continent or in the diaspora Africans, and First Nations peoples First Nations peoples, it is important to tell you where I actually live, so as to give you some notion what we are dealing with - well, what Hawaiians are dealing with in their own occupied land, and what I deal with as someone who witnesses this atrocity.

Hawaii is beautiful. I see the stars every night outside the window of my cabin. This beauty, however, since this is an occupied colony, is marketed to tourists and to mainlanders with access to capital. Tourists dollars and mainland capital is used to build and run resorts and buy cheap land on which housing is constructed. Fuck the Hawaiians, who have no access to capital and are losing access to their land.

Unlike Africans in the diaspora, Hawaiians are newly colonized and newly polluted with Anglo-Saxon obsessions and their gutter monotheistic religion. This means two things: to the careful eye, the spirit of Margaret Mead can still see the beauty of the Hawaiian body and its connection to the earth and its energies. Though still barely visible, this beauty has been whipped out of Africans for a good 500 years, then reinforced by bad Negro parents emulating white plantation politics.

But this also means the Anglo-Saxon obsession with shame culture is rotting the spirit of that connection Hawaiians had with the earth. So of course their incidence of illness should increase. Of course their social connections should be undermined.

It sucks the spirit to try to thrive in such a place, which is like a person, who is unable to embrace you because it is losing the capacity to embrace itself.

My limited experience with travel and life have already taught me those places with the least and newest "contact" with Europe, its Anglo-Saxon peasant trash, and its maniacal ways are actually populated with the most beautiful and well-developed people.

So as Hawaii corrodes under US occupation, like the little bird I am I look for a new perch to land on. A few well-meaning, clueless people have suggested going back to California, or Missouri, even Florida. This only depressed me. For one, I feel no desire to go anywhere on the mainland.

But also, the only places afforded me on that almost thoroughly corrupted landscape are bantustans where I am really meant to struggle and die.

According to Wikipedia, a bantustan is "a territory set aside for black inhabitants of South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia), as part of the policy of apartheid." In a broader sense, the term has come to refer to any such enclave set aside by the state for its least desired populations.

So, for example, the term bantustan was used in reference to the ridiculous partition of Palestinians during the Clinton "peace" negotiations between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Israeli white-settler government. The Palestinian territory, according to the maps which were scarcely printed in the US press, showed the ethnic Palestine as several non-contiguous spaces spread across Israel.

Bantustans are not intended to be self-sufficient entities but what we in North America might refer to an "Indian Reservations."

Japanese POW's might reference internment camps.

Black ghettos are bantustans. The fact they are Black African and poor ghettos is by design. Most Africans understand this; but not enough since we are still handing our children over to the plantation and wondering why we too are getting sicker. Almost no white person will accept the fact of the bantustan, since this white settlement is the greatest thing to befall the planet since Jesus personified himself in a Roman cleric.

But like Ted Kaczinski I no longer care about the views of white people and the world ... until it impedes upon mine: that is when the reclusive Unibomber emerged as superhero.

I have my eye on Africa, but I also know that if I want my spirit to breathe it will only do so in a place least touched by the hand of Jesus and the progeny of his disciples. Life will not come from acquiring more skills or pursuing more degrees: that is a fool's game and enough fools are playing it.