Patrick Bond of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Azania (South Africa) joined the show this week to discuss his recent reporting on Obama’s African policies. Dr. Mark Bolden joined us as well as we went over those policies and highlighted the stark similarities between Nelson Mandela’s post-apartheid U. of S.A. presidency and Barack Obama’s pre-apartheid U.S. of A. presidency. This was all also done in the context of Obama’s re-election and the delusion it continues to impose forcing too many to ignore the many broken promises and lies told by this centrist-conservative and ultimately imperial president.
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Awaiting the formalization of the war because it’s coming.
Thank you brother Jared for your continuing contributions! Here is the link to the Pambazuka article:
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/84695
You can subscribe to Pambazuka and get more news from Africa.
I’d like to suggest that there is good news behind Obama’s re-election, and it has nothing to do with Obama.
This election, like last election, Obama won despite the nearly unfathomably rich and powerful machine that is set up to defeat him.
This year the dinosaur cracker right was especially “out” about its white supremacist agenda, and it tried very openly to appeal to feelings of race hatred, misogyny, xenophobia. It lost–even tho it had the usual toolbag full of voter suppression, racist governors, rigged election machines, propaganda campaigns, intimidation, sneaky redistricting, and nearly unlimited money.
This rejection is precisely the good news. Ordinary people came out and voted many of the motherfuckers right back under the rocks where they came from.
Before focusing on whether Obama deserved our vote or not, let’s consider and celebrate the power that *we* have right now.
If our refusal–and “our” is a very broad category–is able to defeat the mega-right, then we should be able to do a lot of things that we may not have thought possible before.
Yes, we can try to hold Obama’s feet to the fire and ask him to change his behavior. But we can also use this power of refusal to create the life we want without him. We don’t need a king. We are *everywhere* and we can build the structures of daily life that we really want. Food, water, energy, health, every resource–we can build these structures everywhere on every continent.
Our refusal is our weapon. We can learn from our brothers and sisters in Haiti who, as hungry as they are, burned the seeds that, in a particularly odious gesture of “charity”, Monsanto sent them. We can do that, too, and build the power that we have ourselves rather than demanding that our Leader do it for us.
Obama, alas, will not help us. Instead of looking at all the ways that he must fail us, let’s focus instead on why we don’t need him.
I didn’t vote for Mr. Obama this time or the last time. Obama, whose domestic and foreign policies are, for the most part, mirror images of those of the “defeated” Romney, “won,” by raising at least as much money for his campaign as his opponent did. Much of it also came from the same corporate and white supremacist sources. President Obama is as much under the influence of the so-called “m****fs” as a President Romney would have been. If this is a cause for celebration, I wonder what a defeat would look like. I agree that we have no choice but to work without Obama. I do not agree that Obama or any other politician should be rewarded by being elected AND reelected in exchange for nothing.