Concepts African People Should Know Worrill’s World By Dr. Conrad W. Worrill, PhD BlackCommentator.com Columnist

At this current stage of history in the Black Liberation Movement, it is important that key concepts be revisited and re-discussed in our continued efforts to seek clarity on certain ideas that are fundamental to the white supremacy foundation of America.

First, there is the idea and concept of the “Maafa.” When we discuss genocide against African People in America, we must also discuss the Maafa, because it was this Maafa that has historically created the on-going genocidal conditions inflicted against African People in America.

When we use the term “Maafa” we are talking about an African term used to describe tremendous suffering, indescribable atrocities, disaster, calamity, catastrophe, or injustice. This term is used to refer to the protracted suffering of African people and culture as a consequence of the Transatlantic Slave Trade System. As the African Maafa researcher, Michael Scott, explains - “No African was waiting as a slave to be traded to the Europeans. In all regions of Africa, from which Africans were transported, the African was involved in a brutal war declared by the European aggressor, interested in exploiting the human and natural resources of the richest continent on the earth.”

Further, Brother Scott reveals, “These Africans who became prisoners of war were placed in detention camps and then transported to the Americas to be enslaved by the benefactors of their captors. No African began his or her ordeal as a slave. Africans were reduced to slavery by conquest.”

It is important for African People to understand and internalize these brief historical facts. Just as the Jews, or any other group of people in the world, internalize their holocaust, and act on it, African People must come to the collective reality of our Maafa and act on it also.

Finally, Brother Scott instructs us that, “Our foreparents were innocent victims of these heinous system of forced labor. They were never able to comprehend being seized in early morning attacks on their villages by vicious raiding parties. They were never able to understand why they were being sold by the avaricious middle men. They could never fathom why they were being marched in fetters and chains to the coast where they were bartered for European merchandise especially rum and guns. They could never appreciate 'why they were being warehoused in hell-like dungeons in Elmina or Goree.”

So now that we have some insight into the idea and concept of the Maafa, it should make it easier to understand the idea and concept of genocide. In Olomenji’s book, White Genocide, Black Obsolescence, he defines genocide very succinctly. He says genocide is the “deliberate and systematic destruction of Black people by white American socio-economic and cultural forces.”

According to Brother Olomenji, America has created an ideology that justifies the annihilation of African people in this country. This is the function of genocide by those who inflict it on a mass of people. That is, they create a rationale for the annihilation and then try to explain that it does not exist.

This was the case in the CIA involvement in cocaine distribution in Los Angeles in which the profits were used to finance the CIA-backed Contra army in Nicaragua. This involvement of the CIA caused a proliferation of the distribution and sale of crack cocaine across the African Communities of America, causing serious devastation to our communities. The United States Government tried to downplay the CIA's involvement in this incident by saying that this is an isolated situation and, in fact, this is not true.

As a result of the Maafa and the genocide against African People in America, we must step up the demand for Reparations as the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, N'COBRA, is advocating, as are many other African organizations throughout the world.

Reparations simply means repair for injuries, harm and damages. As it has been pointed out, over and over again, we were made chattel and worked for more than three-hundred years without pay or other compensation for the value of our labor. The white man and white woman stole and criminally appropriated the services and the value of three-hundred years of labor and then passed it on through inheritance to their children. This process helped create the United States of America and this is fundamental to our demands for Reparations.

We must continue to discuss these ideas in our efforts to dismantle our mental shackles. Every race and every ethnic group in the world protect their interests and African People should and must do no less.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Conrad W. Worrill, PhD, is the National Chairman Emeritus of the National Black United Front (NBUF). Click here to contact Dr. Worrill.

Apartheid Is Here and So Is the Revolution By Suzanne Brooks Women of Color By Suzanne Brooks BlackCommentator.com Columnist

President Obama is accommodating other communities that deserve accommodations and justice. It appears there are only two groups denied any accommodation or consideration at all: African Americans, for whom he says the answer is that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” which has never been true for African Americans; and women of color, whom he refuses to recognize as having any issues at all or even existing. Yet, he expects us all to vote for him in the same nearly-unanimous numbers as in 2008. African Americans and women of color who accept this kind of treatment are fooling themselves that Republicans will be worse. There is nothing worse than what we are getting. We are at the bottom under the Obama administration. I suggest writing in Barbara Lee for President and Dennis Kucinich for Vice President in the primaries on both Republican and Democratic tickets. If Obama doesn’t get the message and deliver more than symbols and promises before November, we should write in Lee and Kucinich then, too.

The Obama Jobs Plan robs Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts to recipients began a year ago and are ongoing, quietly, as if the majority of the public will not find out. The Martin Luther King, Jr. statue, which had jobs associated with it, were jobs that went to the Chinese who designed and built it. The 911 Memorial was built by Germany and China which also provided all the materials. US steel mills lack work, while the US bought steel from Germany for this. No wonder there are problems with the Post Office, which buys its vehicles from Europe.

Since corporations are now, according to the Supreme Court, to be considered persons for the purpose of donating to campaign contributions, shouldn’t they also then be persons under the IRS code which requires all Americans to pay income taxes on their worldwide income? The rest of us can’t hide money offshore or in Swiss banks to escape paying taxes. Instead, Obama is working on a permanent low tax rate for the rich and corporations.

Incidentally, despite all the complaining about US corporate tax rates, less than half of US corporations pay any taxes at all, regardless of the rate. Instead, most receive subsidies from a US government that refuses adequate support of medical care, food subsidies, education, schools and other needs of the majority of the people.

Republicans, Democrats and the Obama administration just made major changes in Patent law. Among other things, US companies are roaming the world and patenting plants used by indigenous people for medicines in order to take control of medicines worldwide. This often bars the indigenous people from continuing their medical traditions with nothing to replace it. It also guarantees high prices and control to the drug companies indefinitely - the same drug companies that have ceased manufacturing drugs within the US because they want to pay slave wages in countries with no safety requirements for the drugs produced. Neither aspirin nor flu vaccines are manufactured here anymore, but in countries where contamination is frequent.

A few days ago, Mayor Bloomberg of New York City stated that if there is no help for the hungry, homeless, uneducated and unemployed in New York soon, there will be riots in the streets, including race riots. Thousands are now protesting in the streets of Poland because of conditions similar to those in the US - information left out of the news by mainstreet media. The US is like a ticking time bomb, with no substantive leadership working for anything more than increasing their personal enrichment at the price of the loss of freedom, health and lives of 80% of the people who are being reduced to subsistence. Republicans are openly calling for people without insurance to be allowed to die. Michele Bachmann has proposed the elimination of the current minimum wage and reducing pay rates to the levels of other countries, those where the people work as serfs and slaves without medical care, clean water, housing, education and adequate food.

While claiming to follow the constitution, politicians refer to the original version which denied citizenship and humanity to people of African and Indigenous descent, supported slavery and kept immigration almost totally for European whites. What I don’t get is the passivity of the people being led to slaughter. Constant fear mongering, especially on the anniversary of 911 has begun the process of people in this country accepting the presence of armed soldiers on our streets, in schools and government buildings. Whether you look at the German, Indian, Australian, Israeli, South African or early US models which slaughtered millions of Jews, Muslims and Hindus of India, Aborigines, Palestinians, South African Blacks, the US Indigenous people and the enslaved African people. Apartheid is here. So is the revolution.

White House Launches New Native American Website
The White House Office of Public Engagement recently announced the launch of a new website which is intended to provide Indian Country with an additional tool to help navigate federal agencies and their services to tribal communities, and to learn about how President Obama’s agenda will impact Native Americans. The new website is called “Winning the Future: President Obama and the Native American Community.”
EPA Announces Settlement with the Department of the Interior to Resolve Violations at DOI Schools in Indian Country
On August 25, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a comprehensive settlement with the Department of the Interior (DOI) to address alleged violations of waste, water, air, toxics and community right-to-know laws at schools and public water systems in Indian Country owned, operated, or the legal responsibility of DOI’s Indian Affairs Office. The settlement will protect students’ health and the health of communities in Indian Country by reducing potential exposure to environmental hazards.
Under the settlement, the DOI’s Indian Affairs Office, comprised of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE), will correct all of the alleged violations at 72 schools and 27 water systems. DOI will implement an environmental compliance auditing program and an environmental management system (EMS), designed to improve environmental practices at all of its BIE schools and BIA public water systems serving these schools.
DOI has also agreed to install a solar energy system which will serve a school located in the Grand Canyon. The solar energy project will help ensure a more reliable source of electricity for the school and local community. DOI will also pay a civil penalty of $234,844 which it must spend to correct violations of the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act (AHERA) at its schools.
EPA conducted compliance inspections and data reviews at more than 100 BIE/BIA schools and public water systems. The settlement addresses all alleged violations under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Emergency Planning and Community-Right-to-Know Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act’s PCB provisions, and AHERA.
The settlement affects 60 tribes throughout the U.S. which have DOI Office of Indian Affairs schools or public water systems on or near their tribal lands. Consistent with EPA’s consultation process with tribes, EPA consulted with the 60 tribes affected prior to finalization of the settlement agreement.

More information on the settlement

It is worth saying it twice: “Apartheid is here. So is the revolution.” For months, maybe a year or more, I have been writing letters and essays and now a book, calling attention to the weariness and despair of the masses of people suffering and dying at the bottom of US society while armies are sent to “bring democracy and build infrastructure” - schools, hospitals, businesses, food, medical care and more, allegedly, to others for a variety of stated reasons which daily grow less credible to those who used to believe them. Though many have listened, few in positions of power have been among the listeners even when, as a few days ago, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg made some of the same predictions. Now, more voices are joining in with similar observations, the same outlook and details of the same projections.
Today I received the following article: “Breaking: Wall St.Occupation: live streaming & Mission Statement.” It is worth reading in detail. This information is consistent with rumors I heard some time ago and which I have believed will take place. It reminds me of a time when I worked at an area university, directing the Multi-Cultural Center and realized that the campus was headed toward explosion because of its racism. When I tried advising all parts of the university executives of needed action, they blew me off. Later, when students against all the -isms took over a student government meeting to make demands for change, the same execs came to me and asked that I go to the meeting and intervene because the students would listen to me. I refused to intervene at that point because I was unwilling to align myself with those who could have resolved these problems peacefully but had refused to do so. I also refused to discard the respect the students had for me based on common goals and aspirations. I am sure this was just one more of the reasons people in power tried to destroy me.

Lately, I have been speaking to young (18-35) people everywhere, informally, whenever opportunity arises, about the histories of social revolutions which always arise from their cohort. I have also been sharing my view that they have, throughout history to the present, overthrown dictators and repression and that their intuitive and creative understanding of contemporary technology makes them even more formidable today.

However, I also point out that they are generally lacking in the education, skills and experience needed to build social institutions and government, the infrastructures without which revolutions are not sustained nor do they make meaningful changes. I suggest that they look for those of us, from 35 to 100+, for that help. This means new kinds of partnerships between generations and a new maturity that ends cross-generational competition for power and wealth. They need to bring us, those over 35, into the current millennium of technology and creativity. We need to teach them how to build what is needed with the understanding that we are also teaching them to replace us in leadership roles, freeing us to more developmental and creative activities. This will free us (the over 35) to put greater efforts into developing full, informative libraries, archives and other repositories of what we have learned. They are the ones who can tackle gang problems, for example, and drug problems.

There is so much that can be done in collaboration. This is the path to examining new forms of government and much, much more. It will be a struggle but I believe the changes are inevitable and unstoppable. As the following information suggests, the time is here to decide what role each of us plans to play.

Live! Wall St .Occupation: Livestreaming & Mission Statement and Kevin Zeese analysis
Live Streaming of Occupation of Wall Street which begins Sept.17,2011

A Modest Call to Action on this September 17th
Published 2011-09-18 01:46:38 UTC by agnosticnixie
This statement is ours, and for anyone who will get behind it. Representing ourselves, we bring this call for revolution.
We want freedom for all, without regards for identity, because we are all people, and because no other reason should be needed. However, this freedom has been largely taken from the people, and slowly made to trickle down, whenever we get angry.

Money, it has been said, has taken over politics. In truth, we say, money has always been part of the capitalist political system - a system based on the existence of have and have-nots, where inequality, inherent to the system, will inevitably lead to a situation where the haves find a way to rule, whether by the sword or by the dollar.

We agree that we need to see election reform. However, the election reform proposed ignores the causes which allowed such a system to happen. The political system has been beholden to political machinations of the wealthy well before its founding.
We need to address the core facts: corporations, even if they are unable to compete in the electoral arena, would still retain control of society. They would retain economic control, which would allow them to retain political control. Term limits would, again, not solve this, as many in the political class already leave politics to become part of the corporate elites.

We need to retake the freedom that has been stolen from the people, altogether. If you agree that freedom is the right to communicate, to live, to be, to go, to love, to do what you will without the impositions of others, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that a person is entitled to the sweat of their brow, that being talented at management should not entitle others to act like overseers and overlords, that all workers should have the right to engage in decisions, democratically, then you might be one of us.

If you agree that freedom for some is not the same as freedom for all, and that freedom for all is the only true freedom, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that power is not right, that life trumps property, then you might be one of us.

If you agree that state and corporation are merely two sides of the same oppressive power structure, if you realize how media distorts things to preserve it, how it pits the people against the people to retain the current power structure, then you might be one of us.
And so we call on people to act.

We call for protests to remain active in the cities. Those already there, to grow, to organize, to raise consciousnesses, for those cities where there are no protests, for protests to organize and disrupt the system.
We call for workers not only to strike, but to seize their workplaces collectively, and to organize them democratically.

We call for students and teachers to act together, to teach democracy, not merely the teachers to the students, but the students to the teachers - to seize the classrooms and free minds together.

We call for the unemployed to volunteer, to learn, to teach, to use what skills they have to support themselves as part of the revolting people as a community.
We call for the organization of people’s assemblies in every city, every public square, every township.
We call for the seizure and use of abandoned buildings, of abandoned land, of every property seized and abandoned by speculators, for the people, for every group that will organize them.
We call for a revolution of the mind as well as the body politic.
Who will occupy Wall Street on September 17? by Nathan Schneider,
Waging NonViolence
When the culture-jamming activist group, Adbusters, put out a call on July 13 for “20,000 people” to “flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months,” it never said who those people would be. Now, the question on the minds of everyone from the Department of Homeland Security to the Lower East Side anarchist set is just who and how many will actually show up?
The simplest cop-out of an answer is to say that nobody exactly knows. To an extent, it’s true. The large, established, membership groups - unions, lobbies, etc. - have kept quiet about it, so their rank-and-file can’t be counted on en masse. There’s no central planning committee, no permit with the city, and not even an official website, so there’s no obvious person to ask for a prediction or a figure. (Adbusters continues to say 20,000, although its role in organizing is, according to Senior Editor, Micah White, solely “philosophical.”) The event will be, among other things, a test of the scattered American grassroots - their ability to mobilize against the outsized power of corporate elites, and their inclination to do so.
Some on the right-wing’s most lunatic of fringes have taken advantage of the information vacuum with headlines declaring “Wall Street Targeted for Britain-Style Riots” (along with thoroughly fictitious links to ACORN, SEIU, and even President Obama), a claim which has already turned into a fundraising scheme for Republican political candidates.
Imaginative, but false.
A better place to look for some sense of what’s in the works would be a visit to the “NYC General Assembly” that has been meeting for the past month or more on Saturday evenings in New York’s Tompkins Square Park. For as long as five hours at a time, a crowd of 100, give or take, discusses matters of process and principles, as well as peanut butter sandwiches, bathrooms, and pepper spray.
They can’t pretend to be able to tell all the people who come what they can and can’t do, but they can at least provide a loose framework and some information about what is and isn’t legal - for example, no tents. They’re not bringing any port-a-potties or appointing any marshals or police negotiators. They talk about nonviolence, with various conceptions of it in mind, and hope for the best.
The group is mainly young, with a tendency toward black T-shirts, bicycles, and hand-rolled cigarettes. A few have accents from Spain and Greece, through which they share stories from this year’s uprisings in those countries. They vary in their levels of experience with the modified-consensus process that the Assembly employs - together with its concomitant courtesies, no-nos, and hand signals. There are those who have never done anything like this before, and then those who are coming freshly-inspired and well-rehearsed from taking part in the three-week Bloombergville encampment earlier in the summer. There’s a contingent from the LaRouchePAC, and there’s a big, bearded man in the back who, against the wishes of some, keeps snapping photos. A police car cruises by, from time to time, but it doesn’t stop.
Their stories are ordinary, but in a charmed sort of way. One regular at the Assembly moved to New York from North Dakota on a whim, and without a job, a few months ago after finishing a master’s degree and breaking up with his girlfriend; almost immediately he found out about September 17 and has been working on the Arts & Culture Committee full-time. Another is a filmmaker who has just been in Egypt interviewing the leaders of the Tahrir Square protests. Yet another is a Vietnam vet from Staten Island with a sagely smile. Still others drift by through the park, stop to listen, and then keep walking, or stay.
Decision-making hasn’t always been easy. But this past weekend, at least, the Assembly decided when it would meet next, as the occupation begins: on Saturday 3 p.m. at Chase Manhattan Plaza, two blocks north of Wall Street. The Arts & Culture Committee will get things going beforehand with a “New York Fun Exchange” (as well as a possible pooch parade) at noon at Bowling Green, home of the Charging Bull statue. The student groups, who have their own allied General Assembly, are rehearsing for a flash mob.
And more: the Fiasco Street Team, Protest Chaplains, the National Lawyers Guild, Guerrilla-Drive-In, and a promise on Twitter about an old band coming back together the day before. Every day this week at noon, there is an occupation-themed public yoga session where Wall St. meets Broad St.
Few groups taking part are more organized, though, than US Day of Rage. Its founder, a sharp-featured, sharp-tongued IT strategist, Alexa O’Brien, insists that she’s “a normal sort of nobody.” She and her colleagues are prolific on Twitter, and their website features a range of resources, including nonviolent direct action manuals, a tactical plan for September 17, and an embedded YouTube video of the group’s official song, the theme from the 1970s show Free to Be… You and Me.
US Day of Rage also has a head start on answering the question that Adbusters posed in its initial call: “What is our one demand?” O’Brien launched her site back in March, while she was blogging about the Middle Eastern revolutions and the revelations coming out of WikiLeaks. On Twitter, she asked people what they thought was wrong with this country, and it all seemed to come down to one thing: the influence of big money in politics. This led naturally to the group’s slogan, a plan for radical campaign finance reform: “One citizen. One dollar. One vote.” Besides that, O’Brien refuses to label herself or the organization with any ideological stamp. “I think it’s really typical of the internet generation,” she says, “to look at process much more than ideology as what’s going to save us.”
There’s a certain ring to this proposal; it has the makings of what Buckminster Fuller called a “trimtab” - a simple change that could change the course of the whole system. But it’s far from a universal priority among those organizing for September 17. Others have called for restoring the Glass-Steagall Act, or imposing higher taxes on the rich, or ending the endless wars abroad.
What one mainly hears at the General Assembly, though, is not a demand so much as an experiment in method. They’re trying to figure out how to make their voices heard again in politics, above the noise of money. What’s drawing people to Wall Street on Saturday sometimes seems to be an aesthetic more than anything, a longing to see Wall Street full of the people whose concerns for which its operations have been blind, and who are ready to get their due. But it’s an aesthetic with teeth. After what has been happening in Egypt and Tunisia, in Spain, Greece, Bahrain, and so many other places around the world this year, people are going to Wall Street to make a real difference.
But September 17 isn’t just happening on Wall Street. For its part, US Day of Rage is organizing actions that day in Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle as well. (Washington, DC will have to wait for the occupation of Freedom Plaza planned for October 6.) Meanwhile, Take the Square, a network that grew out of the Spanish May 15 movement, lists solidarity demonstrations across Spain, as well as in Italy, England, Canada, Greece, Germany, Portugal, Austria, the Netherlands, Israel, and France.
And then there’s the internet. Ever since the news began circulating that Anonymous hacktivists would take part, there has been a lot of speculation online about what they might actually do. One hint comes in the form of Operation Lighthouse, “a fully legal operation in support of the wall street occupation on the 17th” which, in its promotional video, is branded as an Anonymous project. It has also been billed as a revival of New York’s embattled Critical Mass bike ride. According to the website, though, “The @oplighthouse [Twitter] account was suspended shortly after the operation was publicly announced.” Fully legal or not, someone is on to it.
This is a reminder that, while Anonymous’ entry gave the September 17 effort tremendous momentum, it’s a mixed blessing. The FBI has been stepping up its scrutiny of the group lately, and what the Guy Fawkes masks add in mystique and internet-savvy may be lost if the authorities use Saturday as a chance to make an example of Anonymous, especially if protesters aren’t ready to turn a crackdown to their advantage.
Something, in any case, is definitely going to be happening. A lot of people are definitely going to be there, though 20,000 does seem pretty optimistic. Some will know what they’re doing more than others, and all will learn. Not only will this weekend be a test of Americans’ readiness to resist, but of whether an idea lobbed into the internet by Adbusters, then grabbed by artists, students, Twitter hashtags, and a shadowy network of hackers (and hacker wannabes), can really turn into a “flood,” a show of meaningful political force, a new way forward.
“These are new organizational forms that haven’t been tried yet, at least in the U.S.,” said Isham Christie, a graduate student at the City University of New York, speaking at a meet-up in the back of a bar in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. “This is the definition of a truly radical movement.”
Most of the planners with whom I’ve spoken believe it best not to decide very much about what the action will look like before they’re on the street. This will make it a lot harder to control, but also, potentially, harder to defeat - like the uprisings in Egypt, Spain, and elsewhere. September 17, if it is anything, is an ambitious, risky, magnificent unknown. So much depends on who actually ends up being there. Will you?

It seems that the US is now in circumstances that must be similar to those in all the other countries where revolutions and resistance have erupted in the last 12 to 18 months. Since the masses have taken to the streets in European as well as in Middle Eastern and African nations, they have been explained away as the result of Moslem extremists or, as in the UK, of unruly thugs - which left out the issue of racism there. What excuses will be used here as the numbers of people demonstrate, objecting to starvation, homelessness, poverty, joblessness, discrimination for all the types that are here, the lack of a national health plan, and essentially the issuance of so many death sentences to old and young alike in denial of resources to sustain life and in sending so many to commit atrocities leading to injuries, suicides, lives of unending emotional/physical pain, many homeless and jobless, in unexplained, falsely explained and unjustifiable wars? Will the US government order attacks on its own people as all of the others have done? Will US troops obey orders to exterminate friends, family and communities? Is another civil war looming? Will large numbers of people flee the US and, if so, where will they go?
One thing is certain, it will become clear as to which politicians, businesses, organizations, churches, leaders, educators, educational institutions, law enforcement, courts, media, legislators and agencies will support the people and which will obey frightening, destructive orders of those in power. The power elite will be out in the open and so will all the rest of us. It will be a terrible outcome if it takes the country to another civil war, once unthinkable, now on many minds.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist Suzanne Brooks is the founder and CEO of International Association for Women of Color Day and CEO of Justice 4 All Includes Women of Color. Click here to contact Ms. Brooks.

DSK v. DNA: Just Another Day, at the White Supremicist Office Point Blank By Chris Stevenson BlackCommentator.com Columnist

An accused international serial-rapist is back in the news this week, and apparently performing his own damage control. Not that any of it is worth hearing. The criminal case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) was ironically derailed by the same man whose job it is to vigorously charge him; the DA, Cy Vance. What I noticed over the past several weeks, as it became obvious this guy was going to trial, was the rush to discredit the charges of Nofissatou Diallo, the hotel maid, by broadcasting "she lied." Conservative radio jocks couldn't hide the excitement in their voices at the reports that deemed her statements lacked credibility.

Crashing headlong into this tremor of new wishful-thought-broadcast-as-facts, was a an Earth tremor from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), and a deluge of more accusations from other women who claimed to have been sexually victimized by the former French Presidential candidate.

The 5/24 WSJ said the DNA found on the shirt of the hotel maid, Nafissatou Diallo, matched the DNA sample submitted by Strauss-Kahn. Whom is lying to who? "Tests matched a DNA sample submitted by former (IMF) director Dominique Strauss-Kahn and semen found on the shirt of the hotel maid who told police she had been sexually assaulted by him law enforcement officials said." Fine, see you at the trial. If DSK were black that is. It's cold irony that it was announced DSK may even counter-sue Ms. Diallo almost 3 months to the day of the WSJ report. What nerve, a normal person would say. What audacity. No. White Supremacy. What specific facts or incident(s) regarding Diallo's allegations prove her to be a liar? There are none, unless you are anxious to believe Strauss-Kahn's attorney Benjamin Brafman. Everyone else is. Fox News and conservative radio excitedly began airing the possibility the case may be dropped due to her so-called lack of credibility. What about her statements was proven to be questionable? All Brafman could say on Tuesday 8/23 was "because she did lie, and he has suffered enormous damages as a result of those lies." Hmmm... "suffered enormous damages," to a white man of DSK's stature, that means having to step down as CEO of one of the Illuminati’s biggest financial control agencies; the IMF. Between 1980 and 2000 the IMF imposed a 7% increase in taxes to Pakistan's poorest, while their richest were granted a %15 tax cut. The recent flooding in Pakistan has not softened the IMF's war on the poor according to a story by David Cronin. Want more suffering? Not being able to run for President of France, comme ci comme ca.

Need I mention the several days of hard-time on Rikers Island without bail, and then off to luxury-house arrest. Prosecutors said they couldn't pursue the case, and then they lied. They then said it was due to Diallo's credibility and lack of other evidence to prove a forced sexual encounter," according to a wire-service report. Though indicted by a Grand Jury on 5/19, on 6/30 Vance began working for the DSK team. We now know credibility and truth have nothing to do with it. Three months ago Brafman had nothing to say about the DNA evidence. What could he say?

The WSJ quotes prosecutor John McConnell saying "she offered a compelling and unwavering story." How then, did she go from "compelling and unwavering" to having her case dismissed due to lack of credibility? Answer: When a white man rapes a black woman. In this scenario not only does the DA become co-defense attorney, the Judge becomes the DA. He not only dismissed the case, he was said to be in to process of recommending that the State Appellate Court not even take the case up.

Strauss-Khahn may claim to be undergoing "enormous suffering, but he feels "no-ways tired." There's enough new accusations on him overseas to keep his lawyer lying for years to come. What happened with Ms. Diallo is far from new. Foreign journalists chose to remain silent by their own admission. "Time" magazine quotes a Paris attorney speaking anonymously discloses he has an entire pile of complaints from women who say they were attacked by Strauss-Kahn. Others like former New York Attorney Alton Maddox compare the DSK/Diallo case to the Central Park 7. Six black rape suspects were convicted without DNA evidence. What does DSK have in light of his own semen? The best his defense can offer is an alleged phone conversation by Diallo in her native Fula language to her boyfriend; "...don't worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I'm doing." Even if the call were true and the translation accurate, this still does not or should not invalidate the DNA evidence.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist Chris Stevenson is a syndicated columnist, his articles also appear on his blog; the Buffalo Bullet. Follow him on Twitter (pointblank009) and Facebook (pointblank009) Click here to contact Mr. Stevenson.

The Illusion of Democracy The Other Side of the Tracks By Perry Redd BlackCommentator.com Columnist

This is all about the illusion. An illusion is a distortion of the senses, revealing how the brain normally organizes and interprets sensory stimulation. While illusions distort reality, they are generally shared by most people. An example is: “America is a democratic nation that upholds the principles of democracy, freedom and sovereignty,” or “The United States is the bastion of liberty.” Most Americans hold fast to this illusion and have been conditioned to believe it, regardless of what our federal government does - whether action or policy.

These universally accepted statements bring us to a reckoning of the doublespeak that roots our country’s political paralysis and contradictory foreign dilemma. Our relationship with other foreign nations is perilous, at least, and fatal at most. Our interventions in Libya, for what we said were “humanitarian” reasons, fall into questionable waters when we stand by and watch Syria murder its citizenry on a daily basis.

Even worse, we (the USA) support the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya in favor of what we have labeled “freedom fighters” as they undertake the identical conduct of the one we seek to displace. In a 112-page report released September 13, Amnesty International stated that the regime of ousted leader Gadhafi and the rebel government - the National Transitional Council - have both committed war crimes during the current conflict and someone needs to take control to stop the abuses from continuing.

The report on human rights violations during the Libyan conflict details many examples of abuses by Gadhafi loyalists that include "mass killing of prisoners, torture, enforced disappearances, and arbitrary arrests." They shot their first appointed leader in the head in a mob-style murder just two months ago. America never flinched. The illusion of building a democratic Libya is what we’re selling.

The question here is how can we stand behind - with our money and military resources - a manufactured ally who contradicts the principles we purport to stand for? Do most Americans believe an illusion?

Both the ousted leader’s regime and the National Transitional Council have committed war crimes. Is the USA confronted with a Hobson’s choice - a choice between the devil and Satan? Oh, forgive me: That’s what Christians think of Muslims anyway.

Let me share with you another illusion. The Palestinian Authority has been steadily building support for the United Nations (UN) to sanction, this month, the State of Palestine as a member whose territory includes all of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. This move could place Israel in a diplomatic vise. If the sanction is granted, Israel would occupy land belonging to a fellow UN member; Israel would occupy land it settled and has controlled for more than four decades and some of which it expects to keep in any two-state solution. Though the US says it espouses the principles of democracy, freedom and sovereignty, it has committed to veto any majority vote, if the UN votes to grant Palestine its state sovereignty. I was taught in Poli-Sci 101 that the majority rules. That’s how it works in US elections - save Gore v. Bush, 2000 - but of course, that too was an illusion.

How can we Americans maintain confidence in a system, society and nation that contradict its core principles by blatantly denying its values? The expectation of loyalty is a tough row to hoe when we citizens watch the US consistently renege on her word to others. One knows that the same has been, could be - and will be done to any one of us; it’s just a question of when.

President Barack Obama said that a Palestinian bid for recognition next week at the UN was a “distraction” and would not result in viable statehood, as Arab foreign ministers agreed to gather support for the Palestinians at the UN. Why would any people NOT want to be free of occupation? Why wouldn’t the United States champion the thing she cherishes: sovereignty?

In a roundtable with Hispanic journalists, Obama on Monday said that Israel would “hurt itself” if it retaliated against the UN vote by withdrawing resources that might harm Palestinian self-policing efforts. Yet, The US has said it will work up to the last moment to avoid a Palestinian statehood bid. Of course, the US wouldn’t dream of denying its own statehood or that of Israel’s.

Like the uprising at New York’s Attica prison 40 years ago, the media today is distorting reality, just as a magician does through illusion. Case in point: The media reported that the prisoners slit the throats of their hostages in a step for prisoner dignity, but television cameras showed that New York state police fired volleys of high-powered firearms - killing 39 people - 29 prisoners and ten correctional officers and civilian employees.

The takeaway is this: We continue to believe the “stories” reported by the press. They’re more often than not illusion; a clear distortion of reality, yet shared by most people. Why do we so readily believe? I believe we’d rather believe the lie because believing the lie commands us to no nothing; it’s a balm, a soother, a comforter, a pacifier. Doing what we’ve always done will continue to get us what we always got (to do): struggle. Gotta wean ourselves from the pacifier.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Perry Redd, is the former Executive Director of the workers rights advocacy, Sincere Seven, and author of the on-line commentary, “The Other Side of the Tracks.” He is the host of the internet-based talk radio show, Socially Speaking in Washington, DC. Click here to contact Mr. Redd.

Taking on “the Rich” and the Politics of Shared Sacrifice Between The Lines By Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, PhD BlackCommentator.com Columnist

The President did it. He finally called out the rich to share in the nation’s pain. Introducing his debt reduction plan, he put the proverbial “gun” right on Congress, right before the 2012 elections. Now let them go out and defend the rich while the rest of America is hurting. The politics of shared sacrifice is about to become a reality for the Republicans. They’re about to sacrifice some members over this. In the meantime, pragmatism has finally come to this whole balanced budget discussion. It has never been a reasonable conversation to have four trillion dollars in spending cuts without some reasonable interjection of revenues.

And the hostage holding is over. The whole Congress will have to break free from the “budget terrorists” that hijacked the debt ceiling negotiation process. Certainly they will take credit for forcing the debt reduction debate, and that is a partial truth. But now they can take credit for also forcing the shared sacrifice debate. There can be no sacred cows in this process, though there are clearly some (Medicare and Social Security). Common sense would tell us where the revenue should come from. Protecting less than one half of one percent while the other 99 and a half percent suffer is class warfare. Republicans are claiming “Reverse class warfare,” suggesting that the rich are being unfairly targeted. It’s not going to work in the same way “reverse discrimination” worked. The rich got a windfall they never should have gotten under the Bush Administration. That’s when the deficit exploded. If they want to get the deficit under control, they have to put the revenue back. Obama got it right.

In what is being called “the street fight for the future of America,” the debate should focus the nation on “what is rich” and exactly what that means. The plan President Obama is calling the “Buffet Plan” (named after Billionaire Warren Buffet, who has openly advocated tax reform after he discovered his secretary was in a higher tax bracket than he was but earning much, much, MUCH less), asked that anyone making more than one million dollars pay more than the 15% tax they currently pay. In 2010, 440,000 Americans filed taxes earning more than a million dollars. That’s .03 of the American public, out of 144 million taxpayers. It will create 1.5 trillion dollars over the next ten years. That’s significant. Now what will that do? That will put America close to the balance budget approach we operated under the Clinton Administration in 2000. Clinton left office with a budget surplus and was on target of eliminating the budget deficit by 2008. The Economic Growth and Tax Reconciliation Act of 2001 and the Jobs and Growth Tax Reconciliation Act of 2003 were passed to spur the economy and create jobs during the recession that occurred the first year of the Bush Administration. Jobs was on the America’s mind when the 9/11 terrorist attacks refocused the nation’s attention. Giving the rich tax breaks and job creation credits were supposed to spur job growth. No new jobs were created and in fact, the nation experienced zero job growth through the entirety of the Bush Administration—a point conveniently forgotten when the critics blast Obama for not creating enough jobs. However, he has created some jobs.

Named the “Bush Tax Cuts,” this is a policy that is by and large viewed as ineffective and was a gift to the rich to help his re-election. They were supposed to expire in 2010, but the state of economy was such that the debate around letting them expire would have ruined the nation. Obama traded two years more of tax cuts for the rich to get two more years of unemployment benefits for eight million people out of work. We can’t forget that when we talk about the high unemployment rate. How high would it have been had the tax cuts not been extended? The Republicans play “chicken” with the lives of everyday Americans to protect a very small segment of the population who’s benefits outweigh their contribution to the nation. The rich as “job creators” has been, by and large, been written off as a fallacy. That’s why Obama’s plan is timely. Folk are tired of cutting the rich a break on a false premise. The rich get favoritism because everybody wants to “be them.” I don’t know anybody who would say, Naw, I’d rather be poor (or middle class).” Particularly if you’re paying higher taxes.

In a free market economy where wealth is attained without limit, the rich should pay more. Three out of four Americans agree that the rich should pay more, if the poor are going to lose services. It is a practical approach to debt reduction reform in America. The people want their quality of life back. Tax exemption should not be a proposition reserved only for the rich. Everybody else pays their way. The rich should too.

Let’s see how long it takes Congress to agree with the public.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, is a national columnist, managing director of the Urban Issues Forum and author of Saving The Race: Empowerment Through Wisdom. His Website is AnthonySamad.com. Click here to contact Dr. Samad.

If We Can Create Jobs Now, Why Haven’T We Done It? Solidarity America By John Funiciello BlackCommentator.com Columnist

If the U.S. wants to create jobs, why not send the work to the place that apparently has created the most jobs in the past two decades…China?

Notwithstanding that China has been shedding jobs at a dizzying rate ever since the American and European economies began to tank, they still have a lot more jobs than North America and Europe. They have done this with the help of American corporations, but, clearly, China has not been able to create the jobs that are needed in the U.S., so we can’t outsource job-creation.

The paradox is that China has been creating jobs in the U.S. for many years. They are jobs in the service industries and in retail. It got to be a bad joke as long ago as the 1980s that people with master’s degrees and Ph.D.s were asking the obligatory question, “Do you want fries with that?”

And it was the same with people in the “information technology” (IT) line of work and those involved in so many ways with work on computers and computer systems. A whole new category of work sprung up around those “industries.” The people in them, although they apparently are paid well (for people as young as they often are), were just so much surplus machinery. They got no benefits, they got no pensions, they could not complain about long hours (with no overtime) or lack of paid sick time or vacations, and there was no way to redress grievances.

There were no grievances, because there were no grievance procedures. One can make use of a grievance procedure only if there is one written somewhere. Usually, it is only the employer who has a copy, if there is such a procedure, unless there is a union contract. For the most part, the jobs are precariously held and those who do that kind of work live with the knowledge that they can be fired at any time. That’s the way it is in America: Every worker, no matter what kind of work that’s done, is an “at will” employee. That is, in the absence of a contract, anyone can be fired for any reason, or for no reason at all. That’s the law.

President Obama has announced a job-creation effort by his administration and he believes that taxing the rich for their fair share of the tax burden will produce $1.5 trillion that will go a long way toward creating new jobs. The rich this week complained bitterly that Obama’s tax revenue plan is tantamount to “class warfare.” That’s what Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, cried loudly. So did Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). If what they and their kind in Congress have done for the past many years to the working class and, now, the middle class, had not been so destructive, it would be laughable.

What they and their like have done, in service to their masters in Corporate America, to divide the country into (very few) haves and (the vast majority) have-nots, is nothing less than class war. Then, when the tables seem as if they might begin turning, they cry like little children whose trip to buy a new computer game has been canceled. Ryan and McConnell do not want to see their rich benefactors pay another nickel in taxes.

Fortunately for Obama, he has a billionaire on his side. Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, has said in many places that people like him should be paying more in taxes. He pays less (as a percentage) in taxes than his secretary and he thinks that is unfair. However, the right wing politicians, economists, and broadcast brayers have called him out on his remark. They even have called him anti-capitalist. Imagine the mental dysfunction of all of them to call someone who has become so rich in a capitalist economy an anti-capitalist. Now, that’s dysfunction and that’s craziness.

Not being grounded in the reality-based world, the nation’s right wing will continue to say things that are obviously not true and know that a sizable minority of Americans will sit back and say, “Yeah, that’s right.” And, they will vote these minions of Corporate America another term of office. Unfortunately, those who represent the American people seem to be without power and that’s why the prospect of new jobs by the millions seems to be a pipe dream.

Corporate America has spent the last half-century designing and building a U.S. economy that will enrich them as much as possible, without causing the collapse of the entire structure. Until recent years, they seem to have done just that. It took a while, but they managed to get rid of most of our heavy industry and they have sent much of our manufacturing base to other countries. They have parked their money in little countries and principalities that take not a nickel of their money for taxes and they have showered us with service and retail jobs and told us that this is an economy.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of our young people come out of college with a burden of $40,000 or $50,000 of debt and are thrown on the job market. It is the hope of Corporate America that they will find a job in a Starbucks coffee house or a luxury hotel and that they will not show up on the unemployment rolls. We have come to the end of that corporate fantasy. Even those jobs are not easy to come by, since there are five applicants for every job opening. Besides, one cannot pay for food, clothing, and shelter, and pay back college loans on what are essentially low-wage jobs like that.

If Obama’s jobs are going to be good ones (that is, jobs that will allow a worker to live decently and provide for health care, other benefits, and a pension), we’ll have to see the return of manufacturing and industry. It took us 40-50 years to get to this point, so this return is not going to be an easy one for workers or for the nation. We’ll have to give the president a point or two for trying.

The alarming thing (for those who are alarmed at such things) is that corporations are getting rid of jobs at a great rate. General Electric has rid itself of tens of thousands of workers in the past few years, the U.S. Postal Service has sent scores of thousands into retirement or the unemployment lines and recently, Bank of America announced that it would get rid of some 30,000 workers and close hundreds of branches. With all of the announced lay-offs and planned future lay-offs by hundreds of companies, it’s a wonder that the official unemployment rate remains at 9.1 percent. The business press also is reporting that small businesses, which are held hostage by the banks, also are laying off workers or hesitating to hire new workers.

The military and defense contractors are weighing in on the debate, by warning that, if defense budgets are cut, there will be an increase in unemployment. The U.S. military, already taking more of the national budget than the militaries and defense budgets of all other countries combined, is threatening to add to America’s economic woes if we rein in the spending on wars and planning for wars.

Corporations fear that the unlimited profits that come from war will be curbed. They love war. In what other business is stuff manufactured by the hundreds of billions of dollars worth, just so it can be destroyed and replaced? It’s a perfect pipeline from the pockets of the working and middle classes into the vaults of the corporations and the rich. It’s why wars are so pleasurable and convenient for them. Best of all? It’s not their sons and daughters who die in those wars.

The outrageous costs of America’s defense and military establishments don’t seem to have any limits, and our society and nation show it. Even a portion of that total cost would improve and fund excellent schools, provide health care for all, boost the quality of housing stock and, therefore, our communities, and would provide food enough that Americans do not go hungry, as they do now. Rail service, light and heavy, could be restored, as could roads and bridges. At this time, things seem to be falling apart and the rich, having been given much in welfare benefits, are reluctant to share with the rest.

Consumerism is what is generally described as the engine of the U.S. economy. To make that kind of economy vibrant, one needs the masses out in the malls, buying whatever they can find, whatever advertising has made appealing to them. The masses are running out of easy-spending money and that does not bode well for the economy. If things were made in America, if manufacturing were to come back, the economy might not be in such a precarious position.

Republicans across the country are demonizing workers, especially if they are in unions. They have done everything they can to destroy what’s left of the union movement, having set their sights on public workers (teachers first, then highway workers, postal workers, firefighters, engineers) and, after that, they will go after the other workers. So, no worker can look to the GOP for any help…for anything. They can look to the Democrats for a sympathetic word.

The hope of many Americans is that the jobs that are created by Obama’s program will be of a new kind and that they will acknowledge the condition that the environment is in and will be along the lines of a burgeoning “green economy,” something like China’s. The Chinese, despite their own economic and environmental problems, are far ahead of the U.S. in its solar and wind power-generating industries. It is possible that we can follow their lead and create millions of new jobs and tens of thousands of new companies that will acknowledge the end of cheap oil that will forever change the American economy and society.

Or, considering that the Republicans have the monumental power of their negativity, the GOP may block anything that will change the status quo, where the money simply flows to the top one or two percent of the population and job creation stagnates to the point that the Great Depression will begin to look pretty good.

It is up to the people. The broken system is not going to produce the jobs and the living standard that we have had since the end of World War II. Elected officials of either party are not especially trustworthy in their ability to envision and carry out a jobs program that will transform the economy in which everyone will have opportunity for a decent life.

That will take some reshuffling of the structure of the economy and a reconsideration of what Americans have come to view as “the good life.” If the people can come together, they will accomplish this and, perhaps, find that opulence and ostentation are not things toward which we should strive. Our survival as a nation will depend on our ability to see this and use common sense to achieve the change we need.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.

The Irrelevance of the Corporate-Stream 'News' Media Keeping it Real By Larry Pinkney BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

"Truth is on the side of the oppressed."

--Malcolm X [el-Hajj Mailk el-Shabazz]

"The challenge remains. On the other side are formidable forces: money, political power, the major media. On our side are the people of the world and a power greater than money or weapons: the truth."

--Howard Zinn

An uninformed people, irrespective of color or gender, are an enslaved people.

The orator, former slave, and slave abolitionist Frederick Douglass, said unequivocally that "Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave." Indeed, well informed "knowledge" makes anyone, be they a woman or a man, "unfit to be a slave." Or as the philosopher and author Albert Camus wrote many years later, "What better way to enslave a man than to give him the vote and tell him he's free." For women and men alike, to be informed is to make us "unfit" to be slaves. Enter the multi-national corporate-stream 'news' media and so-called 'educational' institutions of this nation.

The objective of the de facto corporate-stream 'news' media is to "make" and keep everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people fit to be systemic slaves of and for the corporate / military elite's plutocracy known as the United States of America. It must be clearly understood that this nation does not have a so-called 'main stream' media. It does have a corporate-stream media overwhelmingly owned and manipulated by a blood sucking, profit-driven corporate elite.

The name of the insidious and despicable game of the corporate-stream media is to keep everyday people distracted, divided, at each other's throats, and woefully ill informed. The goal of the corporate-stream media is to form opinion, not inform opinion. Thus, there can be no well informed, intelligent debate, since the issues are framed by the corporate plutocracy in a vacuum of misinformation, disinformation, and/or omission.

With this understanding in mind, it becomes imperative that politically conscious people of goodwill cease seeking or even expecting the corporate-stream media to give us the full facts. It is simply not in their interests to do so. The everyday people's interests and needs be damned!

Therefore, corporate-driven wars are obscenely defined as somehow being in the ever-vague 'national interests.' Cold blooded extra-judicial internation kidnappings and assassinations are defined as eliminating 'high value targets,' and corporate greed and economic austerity for everyday people at home are defined as so-called 'right to work' legislation.

There is a growing legitimate anger and a concomitant increasing consciousness in this nation on the part of everyday people but don't expect the corporate-stream media to inform you of it. It is not in their interests to do so. There is also a growing movement in this nation on the part of everyday people of all colors who are organizing around and demanding real social and economic justice. But once again, don't expect to be seriously informed about this by the corporate-stream media.

It is time to understand that in the context of the everyday people's struggle for genuine systemic change in this nation and globally, the corporate-stream media is both irrelevant and simultaneously extremely dangerous. One does not have to totally ignore the corporate-stream media, but understand clearly what its objectives are, which have nothing whatsoever to do with serving or fully informing we everyday people.

We must creatively develop the ways and means to inform and communicate with one another by forming and supporting an everyday people's media. Make no mistake about this: the corporate vultures will of course attempt to subvert this process as well, but everyday people can be very creative, and the time is at hand when we must use this creative ingenuity in the interests of we everyday people.

Stop looking to the blood sucking vulturous corporate-stream media to be anything other than precisely what it is: manipulators of the people - and nothing more. The only "truth" and the only "media" that is truly relevant is that of the everyday people.

There's much work to be done. Let us get busy and stay busy organizing in the struggle for real systemic change in the interests of just plain, ordinary, everyday people.

Onward then my sisters and brothers! Onward!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board Member, Larry Pinkney, is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil / political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing activities in opposition to voter suppression, etc., Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil / Lehrer News Hour. For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book.) Click here to contact Mr. Pinkney.

Identity Politics 101: For the Corporations and Financiers or the Politically Conscious? Represent Our Resistance By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

You really only got two choices: You can stay down and be weak, or you can stand where you’re at and be strong.
-Bill Withers, “You”

‘Your days of playing the fool are over. I’m going to tell you what education is, and what it’s supposed to do for you. Stop worrying about being alone. You want to be accepted. If people cannot accept you the way you are, then do without them. You’re not going to die from walking alone. If you are right, you will not really be alone.’
-Miss Taylor, teacher, qtd. in My Life in Search of Africa, John Henrik Clarke
Congress is a shop of wealthy men and women, with few exceptions. Corporate CEOs do not invite the homeless to parties at their mansions. They invite politicians, who they identify with and who support the interests of the corporation on the invitation notice. Wall Street bankers identify with other Wall Street executives because they share the same interests, the same ritzy hotel spots at the same beach resort.

Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry identify with the “religious right” and promote “conservative values.” Barrack Obama cannot identify with Black Americans or Chicanos or Indigenous peoples in the U.S. Black politicians, corporate workers, banking employees cannot be Black, let alone identify with Black America.

The vast majority of Black Americans, regardless of class or gender, identify with the dominate ideological structure in the U.S., and that ideological structure manifests itself in the political, social, cultural, and educational milieu. That social and cultural milieu dares anyone to be Black in America.

It is not surprising that the Black “collective” in the United States is fragmented. It is a “collective” held together not by individuals making intelligent, self-determining decisions based on free choice, but by a “collective” manipulated externally in order to forget its past and its role as the opposition in struggle with the adaptable mechanisms employed by the dominate ideology to maintain control over the Earth’s resources and proliferation of information, knowledge.

White American liberals backed away from movements to secure labor rights and women’s rights in order to identify with and further privilege the hierarchical, patriarchal, white supremacist ideology that promotes greed, profits, competition, and hatred before compassion, solidarity.

Nothing just happened! If anything, the ideology was not killed in 1776. At the end of the American Revolution, it was still there. It was not killed with the freeing of enslaved Blacks or the creation of labor unions and labor rights or with the election of FDR or JFK. It was not killed with the Civil Rights or Women’s Movements. Analytical and common sense understanding of the inhumanity of war after war, the countless dead and maimed paid for by taxpaying Americans, did not kill the ideology. “Sensitivity training” and “diversity” seminars have not killed it.

Revelations of local police corruption and Oval Office cover-ups has not killed it. Neither attending a Pow Pow, nor voting for Obama, nor donning straight long hair to camouflage a Black body, nor the purchase of a Blackberry and an I Pod, or even eating organic food, killed the ideology.

It remains more than a figment in the imagination of more than a few people. And you can call them crazy, if you dare, and dismiss them at your risk, but they never let go of the idea. For them, the utopian image of themselves, like Narcissus, reflected in the waters we drink and in the air we breathe.

And the “love” of Self ideology has been contagious!

If Dr. John Henrik Clarke were alive, he would say that this contagious “love” affair with the Self assisted in the conquering of communal societies in Africa and other similar societies and, throughout history to our time now, the exportation of the European Thought has successfully advanced to groom the next generation of talking heads and uniformed “patriots,” to radicalize the next Osama Bin Laden, and to “baptize” and “educate” the next Black baby born.

Some will say, but wait, I hear bitterness! Didn’t James Baldwin hear that too? I hear divisiveness! We are all in this together - now! Now we are together? Now the level of mud in which we swim is even?

I still hear Dr. King and see his tears when he asked, where are you going, my liberal friend?

SOS! Calling Black youths! I think of the hours King spent with Black youth in his last three years after the gains seemed to yield little by way of dividends. Along with the poverty campaign, did he envision brigades of Black youth?

We should have continued to train our children, Dr. Clarke says. We should have established recruitment sites in our homes and churches and recreational centers. We should have lined them up and said, “Oceanography for you, medicine for you. Metallurgy for you, airport design for you” (The History of Slaves-The Black Holocaust).

“When someone takes your freedom, they don’t voluntarily give it back to you. The only way to get it back is to take it back.”

But we did not take anything back: we gave! We see now that assassinations and big deals and handshakes “ended” African Independence and, in the U.S., Civil Rights, a movement that really never ended because, I argue, it is questionable if such a thing as “African Independence” ever happened or if Black Americans were actually granted rights, civil or human rights with Troy Davis, having just lost his life and 23 million mostly Black and Brown people in the dungeons of the U.S., and so many others unemployed and living among an old friend, poverty.

Our current enslavement to corporate capitalism makes it possible for the partakers in the great love affair of the Self to turn their collective backs and pretends the mud is really leveled and we are all drowning in it - equally.

But if you listened carefully in July of this year, 2011, you would have heard what King foresaw when he spoke about a certain promissory note: “The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households,” “Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics” Pew Research Center).

(No, no talk of race, please! It angers me!)

Back then, Black Americans should have taken care of their business, should have organized and educated, should have “turned the pages,” Clarke says, after the leadership was assassinated and others imprisoned. Instead, he says, “too many of us were out front talking.” We’re the leadership now. We’re the ones you, Master, have been looking for! We should have spoken with “one African voice,” says Dr. Clarke. We should have worried about what “we owed to our future.” But we became busy focusing on our individual selves.

We began a love affair with our appearance and material things. We followed the dictates of the newest slaveholders, the corporate enslavers, the politicians, media, fashion, and entertainment icons. Today, progress: we turn our backs too on the enslaved labor of mostly women and young girls in Bangladesh and in China and the poor and incarcerated among our ranks!

“We will never be whole in the world until we realize that whatever we are in the world, be it Caribbean Island, be it United States, be it Pacific, our political and cultural heartbeat is Africa.”

What happened to Africa those many centuries ago is still happening to Africa through its descendants wherever we are, whatever role we play in this long, long conquest of Mother Earth. The subsequent behavior of those groups who left what is now called Africa for lands north, in what Clarke calls the “icebox” of what later becomes Europe and who returned to Africa with a vengeance, is inexcusable. But just as inexcusable is the behavior, the thinking, or non-thinking of the others.

“What got you into the concept of thinking that a European could be religious or democratic? The two things he can’t afford to be, and if he dared to be either one for twenty-four hours, he is finished” (Christianity before Christ). Democracy does not suit the corporations or the financiers of the New World Order any more than it does the average American liberal.

It is not a call to nationalism or even to Pan-Africanism but a call to examine the reality in which all of humanity is coerced into bowing every morning, noon, and night in one direction. This, in turn, becomes a system and it is labeled, falsely, life. It is a call to recognize and understand that a collection of European Thought, not even recognized as such by Europeans and their counterparts in the U.S. who do not even recognize themselves as a race, a dominant race, attempting to maintain dominion over the Earth’s resources and humanity, is in control The rhetorical jargon of the “post-racial” day speaking in one voice of “human accomplishments” on behalf of “people everywhere” in the wake of racism, is a ruse.

The European concept of life, says Clarke, “is a violation of harmony…harmony with nature…[with] common sense.” In other words, corporate capitalism as life violates “common sense”!

“You come out of a culture where certain things are assured by virtue of coming out of the culture. You didn’t have to fight for them…if you obeyed the laws that governed the culture, the material resources of the culture, based on your need, came to you automatically. These were things of a socialist nature that not only existed in a culture before Karl Marx was born but before Europe was born.”

What African, Dr. Clarke says, after dynasties of relative peace, anticipated what was to come? What host would expect to invite someone into their home for dinner, serve the meal cooked by the wife, play and smile at the children, and then proceed to enslave the host and family and rape the wife (A Great and Mighty Walk, documentary).

You really only have two options - and neither involves the electoral process!

Identify the politically conscious and start organizing!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

On Jobs & Deficit Obama Requires the Wind at His Back Left Margin By Carl Bloice BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

First the good news: The latest New York Times/CBS News found that most people are familiar with the American Jobs Act, President Obama’s $447 billion proposal to create jobs. According to the Times, “Almost half of the public is confident the plan would create jobs and improve the economy. A substantial majority of Americans support the main proposals aimed at creating jobs, including tax cuts for small businesses, improvements in the nation’s infrastructure and payroll tax cuts for working Americans.”

And, most people “strongly support his position that creating jobs should be a higher priority than cutting spending.”

Some more good news: Citing what it called one of “a few promising signs for Mr. Obama,” Times/CBS poll indicates, “Americans strongly support his position that creating jobs should be a higher priority than cutting spending. Democrats and independents agree on that view, while Republicans do not. And across party lines, Americans support his position that a deficit-reduction plan should include a mix of tax increases and spending cuts.” Polling also indicates that most liberals and independents support compelling the very wealthy to start paying their “fair share” of taxes, meaning their rate should be the same or higher than that of working people. A recent CBS/New York Times survey had 63 percent of respondents favoring increasing taxes on households earning more than $250,000 a year.

That should be enough. President Obama is proposing something that most people want, and think will do some good, amid the current economic crisis. Congress should heed his injunction to pass the measure right away with little alteration or amendment. It’s the democratic will, you say?

Yeah, except there a problem. The same poll found skepticism that the President’s handling of the economy is effective and 75 percent of those questioned have serious doubts Congress will step up to the plate. While most aren’t encouraged by Obama’s economic measures thus far they have pretty much given up on Congress altogether. Less than one in five looks with favor on the Republicans on the matter.

Still and all, under the circumstance one might think the President would have the wind at his back and would be able to get something enacted that would at least begin to tackle the unemployment crisis.

The Balance Sheet, the daily commentary from The American Prospect magazine, said of the President’s $3 trillion deficit-reduction plan that “instead of just slashing spending, this time he's doing it the progressive way.”

“One of the proposal's signature initiatives is the "Buffett Rule," which would raise taxes on Americans making over $1 million,” it went on, “The White House will also propose closing tax loopholes for corporations, and paring back tax deductions for all Americans. Overall, the plan would raise taxes by $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years. But there are more progressive goodies in the bag: Obama was expected to raise the Medicare retirement age from 65 to 67. Instead, he is expected to propose cuts to Medicare providers - not beneficiaries. To top it off, Obama has threatened to veto a plan that consists only of entitlement cuts without new taxes.

“This is good politics and policy. On the policy front, tax increases on the wealthy will help to roll back one of the major causes of our deficit problem: the Bush Tax Cuts. Politically, the plan will put Republicans in the position of either working with the president or, more likely, trying to argue that cutting Medicare benefits rather than taxing millionaires is the best way to reduce the deficit.”

“The American political discussion has finally turned to the right target: jobs,” wrote columnist Charles Blow in the Times September 17. “Even so, the president’s jobs bill is already being nickeled and dimed from the right - and the left - even though it is only throwing nickels and dimes at the problem to begin with. But at least it’s a start, even if a long-overdue one.”

Actually, the right-wingers aren’t just snipping at the President’s proposal; they are pretty much flat out against it. They oppose anything Obama proposes. It’s hard for some people to accept (who wants to be cynical) but they don’t want the economy to improve before next year’s Presidential election. That’s why they keep talking about things off in the future that evade the current situation. Or, they use the moment of economic insecurity as an excuse to press forward their pet projects: lessening health, safety and environmental standards, continuing to let the very wealthy off the hook tax wise and undermining such things as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

New York Times former editor Bill Keller was heard from this week complaining that liberals are subjecting the President to “a lot of carping.” “Obama’s deal to continue the Bush tax cuts, his surrender of a public option on health care, his refusal to call the Republicans’ bluff on the debt ceiling rather than swallow budget cuts - these and other compromises amount, in the eyes of the Democratic left, to crimes of appeasement,” he wrote. That’s just overstating the case. Besides, Obama didn’t have to cave on the public option and if he hadn’t, things would be quite different today. But Keller is right about one thing with regards to the liberals and the left: the President “needs their energy if he is to keep his office and have any allies left in Congress.”

Hailing Obama’s emphasis on jobs, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka Monday called on Congress to, “immediately pass the President’s proposal for job-creating investments, to ask the wealthy to start paying their fair share, to focus on the true causes of our long-term deficits, to reject any cuts to Medicaid or Social Security or Medicare benefits, and to stop scapegoating federal and postal employees and retirees for problems they did not cause.” On Monday, the labor organization said, “Thanks to President Obama, our national conversation is moving in the right direction. With the release of the American Jobs Act—and today’s speech - he has come forward with important steps to start addressing our jobs crisis. Now, it’s our job to demand action.” From what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard from fellow leftists, that pretty much describes the reaction to the President’s jobs and deficit taming proposals from the left side of the parliamentary aisle.

“We are gratified that the President is returning America’s focus to job creation and a fair tax rate for millionaires,” said Nancy Altman, co-chair of the Strengthen Social Security Campaign, over the weekend. “We thank the President for leaving alone Social Security, a program that, by law, cannot add to the deficit and so has no place in deficit discussions. We also thank the president for recognizing that raising Medicare’s age of eligibility from 65 to 67 simply shifts costs to the nation’s seniors who have not caused the deficit. We hope that any final plan would include zero reductions in Medicare benefits now or in the future.”

"With today’s deficit-reduction plan the President is aligning himself with the American people,” said Eric Kingson, co-director of Social Security Works. “The President, like Americans all across the country, wants to restore economic security for America’s families by getting people back to work. He has shown that he is listening to the people on Social Security and the Medicare eligibility age.”

On cue, as soon as the President unveiled his deficit reduction and tax plan, the rightwing voices began to scream in unison about supposed, “class warfare. Somehow, in their minds, telling the needy, the handicapped and the retired to make do with less in the way of Social Security, Medicare and Welfare unfairly targets no one, while taxing the very well to do is “Class Warfare.”

The President has apparently done one thing that will firm up support at his “base”: He’s stopped making threats to curtail Medicare. Hopefully, he’s put a stop to Republicans running around quoting him to the effect that it and Social Security are the biggest drivers of the federal deficit. That honor goes to the Bush tax cuts, most of the various wars in which the country is involved, and healthcare costs. New York Times Columnist Charles Blow reported last week that a recent Rand Corporation study found that “between 1999 and 2009, total spending on health care in the United States nearly doubled, from $1.3 trillion to $2.5 trillion. During the same period, the percentage of the nation’s gross domestic product devoted to health care climbed from 13.8 percent to 17.6 percent. Per person health care spending grew from $4,600 to just over $8,000 annually.” That’s not the result of Medicare; it’s a reflection of avarice on the part of the medical and hospital industries (surpassing the costs in all other industrialized countries). It will not be brought under control by limiting seniors’ access to Medicare.

And now? “President Obama’s new jobs plan is a step in the right direction, while some board members of the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England — though not, sad to say, the European Central Bank — have been calling for much more growth-oriented policies,” economist Paul Krugman wrote Monday. “What we really need, however, is to convince a substantial number of people with political power or influence that they’ve spent the last year and a half going in exactly the wrong direction, and that they need to make a U-turn.

“It’s not going to be easy. But until that U-turn happens, the bleeding — which is making our economy weaker now, and undermining its future at the same time — will continue.”

Of course, it ain’t over ‘till it’s over. But I go along with Fire Dog Lake’s view:

“The social safety net is off the chopping block for now.” And that’s real good. And, the bulk of the credit is due to the “tireless efforts” of political activists, and everyday people in defense of the social safety net…”

Resistance and advocacy work.

“Our pledge warned politicians from the beginning that they couldn't cut benefits and expect to survive politically,” says FDL. “The Wall Street-owned, austerity-crazed Congress will still try to push for benefit cuts, but it will be much more difficult to accomplish without the President out in front supporting them.”

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union. Click here to contact Mr. Bloice.

REVELATION

When I was younger, I had a talent for fitting in without belonging.

World War II produced two unforeseen events with profound implications for the rest of the twentieth century

In his must-read cultural analysis of the impact of the VietNam war on the American psyche, H. Bruce Franklin (who served in the JSAF, and, later, as a tenured professor of English literature at Stanford University was fired because, in the words of the university, "his views were so strongly held that he could not be rehavilitated from them" in his political activism which included incredibly successful efforts {along with Stokely Carmichael} to get signatures to bring to ballot referendum of whether or not the maker of the chemical defoiliant Agent Orange should be permitted to operate within the boundaries of Redwood, CA ... while not succeeding in their efforts, the activists and community organizers made the chemical maker VERY uncomfortable)


World War II produced two unforeseen events with profound implications for the rest of the twentieth century, including the cultural wars of our historical epoch. The first was the Russian Revolution, which sparked communist revolutions and revolutionary movements from Mongolia to Germany and then around the world. The second was the national liberation movements of the colored peoples in the colonies and neo-colonies ofthe great empires.

The embattled French and British empires had taken two very dangerous steps during the war: they had brought troops from their colonies in Africa and Asia into the European battlefield, and they had ordered many of their African and Asian subjects to violate the most fundamental taboo underlying white colonial rule, the prohibition against people of color ever committing violence against white people. What happened to the consciousness of the African troops from the French and British colonies, for example, when they were ordered to kill white Germans? Even more dangerous was the light shed on the fundamental rationale of white colonialism--what the British called "the white man's burden" and what the French called "la mission civilisatrice"--that the "West" was bringing "civilization" to the backward, benighted colored peoples of the world. The colonized peoples were of course already aware of the misery and oppression brought to their homelands by these civilizers, and so were some people from the colonizing nations. For example, back in the middle of the nineteenth century, a young American author and ex-sailor named Herman Melville, whose global voyages had allowed him to witness some of the ravages of European colonialism, became convinced that "the white civilized man," as he put it in 1845, is "the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth." During World War I, what Africans and Asians, as well as American "Negroes," say in the great cradle of "Western civilization" was an insane orgy of mass murder and devastation on an unprecedented scale, as the hallmark of this civilization, its miraculous technology and vast production, was used to turn portions of Europe into poisonous wastelands.

...
In the global cultural and political wars emerging from World War I, the hegemony of European culture, as well as its alleged aesthetic and moral superiority, was directly challenged by people of color everywhere. This was the period, for example, of the May Fourth Movement in China, the Harlem Renaissance with its roots in the British Caribbean colonies, and the movement among francophone peoples in Africa and the Caribbean. Among the political and intellectual leaders who were to emerge from this awakening were Jomo Kenyatta, first president of Kenya; Sukarno, first president of Indonesia; Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana; Mao Tse-tung of China; Carlos Bulosan of the Philippines; Agostinho Neto, first president of Angola; Leopold Senghor, first president of Senegal; and Ho Chi Minh. Many of these leaders were also distinguished literary figures, including such fine poets as Neto, Mao, Ho, and Senghor, who, together with Aime Cesaire, co-founded the negritude movement and translated many worked from the Harlem Renaissance into French. Culture, especially literary culture, in the lives of these anti-imperial revolutionaries was never divorced from political issues and action.

The explosion and recognition of multicultural and popular literature in America during the 1920s and 1930s must be seen in this global context of the anti colonial movement among people of color, the revulsion against the carnage of war, and the Russian Revolution, which was soon offering a theoretical basis for proletarian and ethnic literatures. It is no mere coincidence that the 1920s was the decade of both the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age, a term borrowed from African American popular culture. Then, when the Great Depression struck the United States in 1928, it also blasted holes in dams that had long separated "high" and "low" culture, releasing a flood of multi-ethnic, working-class, and sometimes even revolutionary literature that threatened to overwhelm the dominant British tradition.

The conservative reaction against the radicalization of 1930s culture was swift and increasingly powerful. In literary studies it took three interrelated forms. First was the cult of the "great books," originally codified by overtly racist propagandists and soon institutionalized at Columbia and the University of Chicago, two universities in urban centers most threatened by the rising flood of radicalism. Second was a rigidly tightened definition of the canon of "major" or "great" literature to be included in anthologies and course, one that eliminated all writers of color. but most important in shaping the study of literature in the 1940s, 1950, and 1960s before the impact of the Vietnam War was New Criticism.


Although New Criticism came to be regarded as an apolitical methodology designed to study literature for "its own sake," without any corruption influence from ideology or social context, that was neither its founding purpose nor its enduring effect. The original New Critics, first coalescing at Vanderbilt University, explicitly presented themselves as "reactionary" saviors of the culture of Western civilization from the encroachments of the subcultural influences of colored and other working-class people. Their announced purpose ... was to combat "vulgar" culture, promulgating in its place the "finest" values of "the Old South" and literature congenial to their ideology. For example, the leading New Critic Allen Tate declared that "the Negro" had "had much the same thinning influence upon the class above him as the anonymous city proletariat has had upon the culture of industrial capitalism," and then went on to explain that "the Negro" "got everything from the white man," but "we could graft no new life upon the Negro; he was too different, too alien." The hallmark of New Critical methodology--intricately detailed and nuanced readings of texts--was actually a corollary of these texts deemed worthy of study, texts filled with elaborate ambiguities and ironies, texts therefore not easily accessible to common readers. In the two decades after World War II, New Criticism triumphed not only in American higher education but in the teaching of literature throughout elementary and high schools as well.

Larry Pinkney, the former Black Panther who won his release from being a political prisoner in Attica by arguing it on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly, takes up the issues here, in an editorial he published in 2007, entitled "COLLECTIVELY DEFINING OURSELVES."


This is also precisely why trojan horse US Presidential candidate, Barack Obama, went so far as to smugly and most inaccurately state that "there is no Black America." [Reference NPR: Can Barack Obama Win the Black Vote?] Obama's "there is no Black America" assertion is an abomination, and is exactly the kind of dangerously ridiculous and demeaning rhetoric that Black America has endured from white racist political candidates. Perhaps, he wishes that there were "no Black America" and no Black American collective consciousness of Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Haimer, Medgar Evers, or even Martin Luther King, Jr. Perhaps, he wishes simply to define Black America out of existence. Black America will never allow itself or its ongoing collective struggle to be defined out of existence by Mr."There is no Black America"- Barack Obama or anyone else, regardless of their biological color. This is an example of how utterly horrendous the act of allowing others, who in actuality do not represent our social, economic, or cultural experience, to define who Black Americans are and can be. To Barack Obama, we Black Americans will surely say, as did our African ancestors, "Beware of the naked man who offers you clothes." Black America does exist and we shall continue this struggle to collectively define ourselves.

In our daily lives we must reject the subtle and overt racist assertions of white America. Simply replacing some white faces with a few biologically Black faces in television commercials for some white owned product or company is not progress or freedom. It is opportunistic exploitation, combined with cynical tokenism on the part of white racist, corporate, capitalist America. We must not let ourselves or our young people be defined by this most insidious form of cultural and financial exploitation. As Gil Scott-Heron and others so aptly said back in the day, truly "the revolution will not be televised." An important part of this ongoing political and cultural revolution or struggle in America (and it is ongoing) is all about definitions and defining. We must continue to collectively define ourselves as Black people in the 21st century.

Another potent weapon regularly used by others to negatively and inaccurately define us Black people and other people of color in America is the so-called "news" and information media. Just as when the so-called news and information media actively sought to demonize and discredit Marcus Garvey, his organization, and those who were a part of it, including the parents of Malcolm X, so it is today that it does precisely the same thing, albeit now sometimes utilizing a few well-placed token biological "people of color" to be white America's defining spokespersons of disinformation.

So it is today that far too few of our young Black, Brown, and Red youth know the repression against, and the actual detailed histories of, struggle by organizations in the 60s and 70s such as the Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, and even the Black Panther Party etc. Indeed, today, the American "news" media continues to play a pivotal role in defining and misinforming people nationally and globally about the deplorable and worsening social and economic conditions endured by the vast majority of people of color in America. Moreover, even presently, a favorite bogey man / disinformation target of the US news media continues to be the Black Panther Party, which the US Government viciously wiped out, just as it had done to Marcus Garvey's organization in years prior. [Reference Biased Reporting on the BPP - Assata Speaks - Hands Off Assata - Let's Get Free].

We must not, for example, buy into the well perpetuated myth that all rap, hip-hop, or spoken word is disrespectful and monstrous for it is not, as the hip-hop / spoken word artist Black Man Preach demonstrates on the cd / album Bumpy Tymes. It shook me to my core and reminded me of the awesome responsibility we have to pass on active consciousness to our younger sisters and brothers. If we seriously do this, they will, more often than not, respond by defining positively themselves and their Black people. As back in the day, the incomparable Pharaoh Sanders wailed, "The creator has a master plan...." Ah, yes.

All of us have the sacred responsibility to take an active part in this ongoing process of defining and articulating what and who we people in Black America are. ALL of us must be the lions and lionesses that collectively define and articulate for ourselves, our youth, and the rest of the world, our past, our present, and most importantly, our future - as we keep on keeping it real.

You say, Christoff it's your birthday - man you still look 33.
What is your secret friend, will you tell to me?
Day fulfilled with excitement, loving friends and family too
a day to share with those you love, a day that was a jewel.

Bedazzled, bedazzling, thrilling, chilling, day,
September birthday baby, with September birthday way
that month the single most blessed, blessed with colors and the sun
that allows the leaves to come out, of their closet and have fun
letting their true colors shine resplendant under sky
we take so much for granted, much better than to ask why?

Why, well it could be answered, but the answer would n'ere be truth
why is just a story told by parents to their youth.
Why is complicated, and why Shakespeare first took up pen
to lead us to an answer, and then another answer again
to see all things connected, to see all life a whole,
yet to me, you're Always Tevyev, the man with such a soul
who sought and then found knowledge, and the wisdom of his age,
who lacked (of course for money) but was rich beyond the page
the page of accounts and ledgers, upon which we mark our time on earth,
and you my friend have radiated so much joy ever since your birth.

Until it comes again, like for the cubbies we can say,
"WAIT 'TIL NEXT YEAR, ALL. WE WILL HAVE OUR DAY."