Instead of championing or even making plain by highlighting and careful simple explanation the plights of Black Americans Obama is instead only reapplying a very old strategy of preparing a base support of voters. Deploying a national propaganda campaign reminiscent of the early 20th century Creel Commission Obama has Michael Blake, as he says himself, “crisscrossing the country… taking our stories directly to people about how the African-American community is benefiting from the Obama administration… For those who say we don’t have a Black agenda,” continues Blake, “I would challenge them and ask, ‘How are our policies not helping the African-American community?”
Click here to read/download/listen to the entire Black Agenda Radio commentary!
Obama Could Free ‘em All
Jared A. Ball
With their call this week for president Obama to free all political prisoners the National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL) have given him yet one more opportunity to actually address a specific concern of many Black and other well-meaning people around the world. And he might as well because, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has written recently, Obama hasn’t done much else for Black America since assuming office.
Instead of championing or even making plain by highlighting and careful simple explanation the plights of Black Americans Obama is instead only reapplying a very old strategy of preparing a base support of voters. Deploying a national propaganda campaign reminiscent of the early 20th century Creel Commission Obama has Michael Blake, as he says himself, “crisscrossing the country… taking our stories directly to people about how the African-American community is benefiting from the Obama administration… For those who say we don’t have a Black agenda,” continues Blake, “I would challenge them and ask, ‘How are our policies not helping the African-American community?”
Well Ms. Taylor provides as succinct an answer to anyone not living it or not able to look out their own windows. Black adult men are suffering the highest rate of unemployment ever measured, 43%. 26% of the Black population lives beneath the poverty line, a line already set so low as to hide how bad it really is. For a family of 4 with a household income of roughly $20,000 “poverty” is too nice a term. These are so-called “Third World” conditions. Besides, as Taylor reminds us, 8% of African America has lost their homes and 21% more are in “imminent” danger of being next. And since, as also Ms. Taylor notes, there has been no real follow up to organize and mobilize by the Obamaton community of liberal leadership many other severe concerns continue to go unaddressed.
Among these include the repressive levels of incarceration and the continued political imprisonment of dozens of movement heroines and heroes. So this call by Black lawyers to free those this country denies are political prisoners remains as important a bright-line standard as any other. These lawyers are calling for the United States to be held to the standards of conduct established by the United Nations’ Human Rights Council (HRC) and Convention to End All Forms of Racism and Discrimination (CERD). In part and in short this would mean releasing political prisoners, who though are not recognized as such, have been demonstrated to have suffered incarceration largely due to the unjust and illegal practices of the FBI and their Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). This systematic and illegal attack on Black activists and those in support of Black liberation now has dozens held in anti-human conditions. Having been there more than 3 and 4 decades they are elderly and deserving of relative freedom.
Two new books are either out already or soon to come. One is Marshall Law by Marshall Eddie Conway and the other is Love and Struggle by David Gilbert. These are to be added to existing works on or about political prisoners such as Safiya Bukhari’s The War Before, Jalil Muntaquim’s We Are Our Own Liberators and the many works of Mumia Abu-Jamal among others and made the centerpiece of symposia, study groups and classrooms so that we may turn them into living documents of political organization and platform agenda items.
So while many continue to say that Obama is not the president of Black people he can still be challenged to amend his nation’s mistakes on behalf of the Black Americans still at least nominally held as citizens. He has done so little. These political prisoners certainly deserve their release, we certainly deserve them back in our communities and the world deserves to know that if they are not freed that all words emanating from this country regarding human rights are as baseless as the claims it makes to freedom and democracy.
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Jared Ball. Online go to www.BlackAgendaReport.com
Dr. Jared A. Ball is author of the newly released I Mix What I Like! A Mixtape Manifesto (AK Press). All proceeds from the book go to support political prisoners. More information can be found online at: IMixWhatILike.com.
With Obama’s world wide demands that governments permit their citizens the right to peaceful demonstrations, we “American Africans” should be hitting the streets big time, in all cities throughout the country demanding that not only our political prisoners be freed but that also the “prison industrial complex” be dismantled and the funds used to support it be redirected into preparing our young men and women to live productive adult lives.
It’s no secret (at least not to us) that the greater number of these people have been railroaded into prison via designer laws and economic manipulation and we need to point this out to rest of the world while our government is going around the world “preaching Democracy”
Yes!
Also there is a new book out by former U.S. political prisoner, Susan Rosenberg. Entitled “An American Radical: Political Prisoner in My Own Country,” this new book is very well written, only $15 (including shipping) and you can read excerpts and order online at: http://AnAmericanRadical.com.
“Free ‘em all?” How can a man who cannot even free himself, free anyone else? President Obama is “trapped” by his worldview, one which places an extremely high value on Anglo-Saxonism, and Zionism, and neo-liberalism, but does not value the Black American experience or African interests at all. He sees the world as his hero Ronald Reagan saw it, through the eyes of a pampered and privileged White man. It should come as no surprise that under his watch, the prison industrial complex is actually growing both in size and in the degree of its ruthlessness. Mr. Obama’s skin color is meaningless to him, except when he uses it as easy way to collect Black votes.