From Glen Ford (BAR under CC licensing):
‘The Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations came together during Barack Obama’s first year in office, in large part to show that there were still lots of Black folks who understood that the struggle for self-determination and a new dispensation for all the world’s people is the real prize worth fighting for. The fact that the new president was Black did not alter in the slightest the demands put forward by the newly organized Coalition at its first rally and march on the White House, in November of 2009.
There have been many marches and rallies and conferences and mobilizations since then. As Obama plugged the world deeper into chaos and war, and a brutal police state tightened its grip on impoverished Black communities across the nation, the Black Is Back Coalition held firmly to its founding principles of unity in struggle against imperialism, white supremacy and the rule of the rich. It was critical that, when the fog and confusion of the Age of Obama finally lifted, at least some Black folks could be identified as having been right all along.
Black is Back! [snip]
(Sunday’s) teach-in will bring together some of the freshest young minds and seasoned veterans of the liberation struggle. So, now you know: November 1st and 2nd is an important time to be in Washington, where the Black Is Back Coalition and its allies will chart a path to “Peace through Revolution.” The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the Hands Up Coalition, United Against Police Terror, Friends of Congo, former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, NCOBRA, and both the ANSWER Coalition and the United National Anti-War Coalition have all endorsed the march, rally and teach-in.’
Report from the front lines in Ferguson, MO: Chairman Omali Yeshitela exposes the sell out leadership of the most recent march held in Ferguson. The Chairman and the Uhuru Movement continue to provide revolutionary leadership to the masses of African people on the ground here in Ferguson.
The only organization that seems to use Twitter is Black is Back, and all Tweets lead to Facebook (goddess knows why). These are all messages from their Twitter page:
‘I posted a new photo to Facebook http://fb.me/1OUxmg713
‘Glen Ford on stage http://fb.me/1ofoAKgGF’
‘Omali yeshitela supporting our speakers http://fb.me/3JRY3q6YC ‘
‘Twanda Jones, sister of Tyron West killed by police in Baltimore http://fb.me/4r2bkET3i ‘
‘We fired up we aint takin no more. Larry Hamm of Peoples Organization for Progress out of Newark NJ http://fb.me/1DJkzmtO3′
BlackIsBackCoalition @BlackisBack_ · 1h 1 hour ago
‘Twanda Jones, sister of Tyron West killed by police in Baltimore http://fb.me/4r2bkET3i’
‘I posted a new video to Facebook http://fb.me/76yo7cPTh’
Uhuru! Freedom!
(from yesterday)
Read ‘The Call’ to march and rally here; some excerpts:
‘The history of U.S. and European white power is a history of war and violence inflicted upon the peoples of the world. It is a history of land theft and slavery that gave rise to the dominant world capitalist economy.
It is a history of the attack on Africa that led to the enslavement of an entire continent and its inhabitants, many of whom were forcibly dispersed throughout the world to work like beasts to create white wealth.
It is a history of the invasion, attack and occupation of the lands now called the Americas, resulting in the annihilation of whole populations whose survivors have been forced to endure conditions of extreme poverty and brutality.
While the various European states attempt to distinguish themselves from each other, Europe achieved its core identity in modern history through its multi-lingual, multi-ethnic unity based on enslaving and colonizing much of the world, the process that gave birth to capitalism and white power on a global scale.
The resistance of the oppressed of the Earth is the real basis of this era of permanent imperialist warfare.
It is not sufficient to cry and pray for peace.
The answer is not peace that can be achieved by a cessation of struggle by the oppressed.
The answer is social justice and reparations, which can only be achieved by resistance to oppression and winning power to the people.
Those who are genuinely concerned with peace must fight for it. A real desire for peace is a desire for social justice and reparations.
Those who want peace must take a genuine stance for social justice. We must distinguish ourselves from those who would settle for an imperialist peace that does nothing but protect the status quo.
Let us say what we know to be the truth: the only real peace is peace through revolution!
(not that the time is ripe yet, they say.)
Associated links:
Uhurunews.com
Pambazuka News
People’s Organization for Progress (website) (on Facebook)
Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
Black Is Back Coalition
café babylon 
Heard someone on Thom Hartmann the other day let Thom know that the Obama supporters he nows are gob-smacked that Barack turned out to be the consummate corporatist [ Obamacare, energy/transit, austerity and continued foreclosure for people + get-out-of-jail cards and bailouts for banksters that are barely scratched by record-setting fines].
They had faith and tried within the system and got done in.
Next/other option: into the streets and organize …
it’s the only cure i see, leMoyne. i’d jut run across this quote from phil rockstroh i like enough to keep my six-year-old blogging help word document. i think it fits here, and many other place this gaggable election season:
“Yet, you cannot force truth upon the deceived. If a deluded soul is fortunate enough to stumble upon it, he will have found it beneath the rubble of his collapsed convictions. His most treasured, now shattered, verities will glint like shards in moonlight, as irascible circumstance has forced him to question all he insisted was true..”
the corollary is another thing i believe: fanatics are fanatics because they have a bit of doubt about what they profess so forcefully.
nice to see you, hope you are well.
Wendy and All
been saying this for over a decade now. The time is becoming ripe for us wild eyed radicals. No matter who tries and silences us. Peace- Love- Solidarity-Respect
hey, michal cavlan. easy for me to say while getting out in the *yard* is hard enough, lol. but yeah, i’m actually glad the nation turned red overnight. might hasten the day… here i go…out to the garden… ;)
Wendye
Enjoy the garden. I agree about being glad the country turned “red”. here is a wild wacky thought. Maybe the reason that the country went “red” is because a significant number of progressive minded people got sick of being betrayed by the corporatist Dems and decided to sit the election out.
Not that MSNBC- Rachel Maddow or any of the other corporatist cheerleaders in “mainstream” media would ever cover that very real political analysis. Or indeed many of the “progressive” political blogs out there.
Viva La Revolution. Enjoy your yard while ya still can. Snow is coming soon. LOL
plenty of opinions out there as to why it turned red, but aren’t midterms usually in favor of the ‘opposition’ party? i had to laff that jane hamsher opined, and may have suggested jon walker write, that the progressive ballot issues did well. well, not here, lol. and fla got no MMJ, sad for bruce, eh?
ah, it froze hard here weeks ago; i’m just taking out some of the dead plants or cutting them back, and planting a few fall bulbs. the leaves have fallen, and orion is up:winter is a-comin’, and damn, i hate winter. it’s so slide-y. ;)
No freeze in my garden as yet, but the plants are standing still, and tubs I bring in SO very greatful. (Who sez plants can’t emote?) Snow on the far mountains and the cranes are flying…
Here’s something that goes with the peace/revolution theme (its antithesis anyway)- and it’s very brief, so you’ll love it , Pepe again:
http://www.vineyardsaker.co.nz/2014/11/06/the-caliph-even-has-his-own-chinatown/
ISIS and Benghazi starting to make sense to me.
Guardian sez Obama’s message from the midterms is he’s gonna concentrate on international affairs. My response – oh noh!
Ooh getting old – “Grateful”.
it is indeed short, juliania, enough so that i read it twice and still can’t absorb its meaning. could it be that i simply have so many blank spots about syria, the caliph, etc. that my mind can’t process this sort of post,, written in what i gather is a straightforward way?
benghazi i may have a better handle on, although i’m not sure i’d pass a test. as an aside, i was dismayed that in patrick coburn’s newest piece on libya descending into hell, he endorsed the bombing of isis positions in iraq, then followed with some caveat or other.
ha! to the international affairs direction. ché said he heard O’s presser after the election, and he was all about ‘working together’ with republicans. he wonders why no one is talking impeachment yet. i reckon that would be largely for show, wouldn’t you? or political hay. they know he’s got himself where they want him, lol, even perhaps where he wants himself.
Saker in Oceania (wattahoot) is simply confirming that the definition of ISIS: US (CIA’s version – “al Sham” … only they can make such stuff up!), with intentions of escalating and widening war, worldwide. Here in JEB’s Floriduh, THC remains a prescription drug; the only losers are medical marijuana (leaf/seed) vendors. Big PhRMA ABIDE$.
no, i must disagree, bruce. those with need of cannabis are the losers. in spite of jon walker’s constant polling results in fla, mmj lost the needed 60% emphatically. i’d figured that the oldies would vote for it, silly me. i reckon the ads against were flamingly ‘anti’, not to mention anti-science, ‘gateway drug’ lies, ‘brain scans of the young who smoke it (no causation shown, of course). the propaganda is hellishly wrong.
mr. wd says that when he used to visit his favorite main street mmj outlet, lined up on the sidewalk were even older geezers than himself, in the main. (only one person is permitted in the stores by law.)
i confess most days i forget to inhale any, but it does help somewhat when i can remember to. i am sooooo sorry that knowing it would help you diabetes and associated neuropathies, you cannot get the help that could…help.
wish i could send you some of ours; we’ve had two years of glorious crops, and i even bring some inside to act as filler for flower arrangements. the scent is lovely, as is the foliage.
it seems that even were you to buy some in deecee, crossing state lines with any is…risky. phooey on all the checkerboard legal/illegal stuff.
oh, and not just big pharma: the gov funds and profits fro both sides of the vaunted ‘war on drugs’.
Pepe has closed the circle, with his giant leaps of logic, on the Islamic State and their recruits so we don’t have to do any of that messy thinking for ourselves.
The picture of Pepe at the Oceana site looks like he has stuck his finger in an electric socket too many times.
ha; i hadn’t noticed the photo. more like one iteration of john lennon. it’s not the face of his that i know. i reckon the saker just grabs his posts is all…
but da wiki says:
“Pepe Escobar (born 1954) is a Brazilian journalist who has lived in locations as disparate as London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Washington, Bangkok and Hong Kong. He writes a column – The Roving Eye – for Asia Times Online, and works as an analyst for Russia Today and Tom Engelhardt’s TomDispatch.com, a project of The Nation Institute,[1] as well as Al Jazeera and The Real News.[2]
Escobar has focused on Central Asia and the Middle East, and has covered Iran on a continuous basis since the late 1990s.[3]
Escobar has reported extensively from Afghanistan. In August of 2000, Escobar and two other journalists were arrested by the Taliban, and accused of photographing a soccer match.[4] The following year, he interviewed Ahmad Shah Masoud, the military leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, shortly before Masoud was assassinated.”….and so on…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepe_Escobar
i actually like his polemics, even as some days it seems he’s had a few drops too many from a tequila bottle.
There was another strange post at the real Saker about support for a return of the Monarchy in Russia. Some people thought it was a great idea for the Russian people to return to being subjects not citizens. Although not mentioned, Putin would be Tsar, I wonder who would be his Rasputin?
o.m.g. say it ain’t so, peter. but somehow i can believe it. when i’d originally asked peeps at fdl about the saker, they all gave him props, although that was not long after the coup. since then, he has had so many new folks come, and from all over the globe, it seems, that he has become The Voice of the kyiv opposition. i noticed a post last month or so in which he said that he was soooo glad that he had once again asked for financial support, and the money simply flooded in.
now he has all those tabs in all those languages, locations, whatever. but he is a former military analyst (like pat laing, whom i don’t care for at all), US naturalized, born to russian parents, i believe, lives in florida…ah, i forget the rest. but it wasn’t long before it turned pretty militarily oriented: ‘sitreps’ from here and there, yada, yada, and the invective got stronger and stronger, etc. he had volunteers translating videos, and i always hoped they were accurate representations: how would i know?
but lol on ‘who’s his rasputin?’
The Sitreps at the Saker are excellent and informative as are some of the posts but there is the 9/11 nonsense and the religious tilt that push it to the margins. He is open to criticism and does admit mistakes so it is much better than most fringe sites.
Juliania seemed to like the idea of a Monarchy in Russia, if I read her comment there correctly.
Besides 0 (who regularly practices rasPutin); prolly a monk at the Iversky Monastery : http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/kremlin-laughs-off-putin-marriage-in-monastery-rumours-423564
Svidaniy’all !)
i dunno, peter; i can’t like much of it, it’s grand if you do. but i can’t speak for juliania, she may herself.
wearing out, bruce, i’ll read the link tomorrow, but an intriguing title, to nbe sure. ;)
It’s not so much I “like” Saker but that there is useful information there including translations of Russian writing unavailable elsewhere and some commentaty from European voices not available elsewhere. I still have to sort the wheat from the chaff but that is true of most news sources today.
Another source for useful information is AL-Monitor which is financed by the Moonies and USAID, which would make it easy to dismiss but there are excellent reports there about the ME from reporters who live there and know the real players.
hard to think of vlad married in any event, but funny link to bring in the rasputin monk, bruce.
sorting the wheat from the chaff is nigh on to impossible for me now. it used to be marginally easier to read there before, now: it all makes me bonkers. i don’t care about the military stuff, and it all takes far more time than i have to sort thru the voices in the hundreds of comments. i do believe i have seen links to AL-monitor though. is it akin to RFE then?
I know you are busy following news in the US and hoping to find signs of revolution in the Homeland but I think any real change will have to come from events occuring outside of our warped reality. Even Occupy was a response to events in Europe and North Africa and this is why I look to news from the Other, including voices from Ukraine, the ME and South America, for signs of real confrontation of the Hegemon.
The US War Machine must be clearly humiliated on the international stage before its grip at home can be broken and the resurgence of the Sword Of Islam may be the force that delivers that humiliation.
Uri Avnery’s latest post at Counterpunch makes an interesting point about the Islamic State drawing its power not so much from its military prowess but from the Idea that it represents.
not a few times i’ve said that if the people don’t stop the war machine, outside forces surely will, and that will be exquisitely painful. yes, occupy was global, and in the west, prompted by the adbusters cypherpunks, although you may espouse an alternative history to that.
and yes, i am looking to domestic clues for a revolution, and never got past four installments of my ‘tipping points to…’ series, when the nation went dark and ominously silent. rather than honk on about what i’m seeing now, i would say that i’d have to consider that stopping the imperial war machine, ‘humiliating it’ as you say…is the key. i do know that david swanson sees it as key, including the trillion dollar military budget.
but somewhere in the mix are the practical matters: privation, ethics, lies from the ruling class that don’t stop, and the general sense of ennui that seems to overlay mass discomfort about our nation’s present and future.
i’ll take a look at the averny piece; i can’t remember his byline, to say the truth. thanks for the recommendation.
a few random thoughts: the u.s., iirc, hasn’t won a war since ww II, and that mainly with the help of the russians. thrown out of iraq and afghanistan, but now still in afghanistan, and more troops are heading the iraq to ostensibly help the kurds. not humiliation as far a the public knows, but if the media dared to tell the truth, well, never mind.
but i did chuckle that averny believes that iran means to bomb israel, and was glad that the other existential threats he’d mentioned in that paragraph were named as partly israel’s doings; how much wasn’t clear.
yes, he ballasted your contention that isis is an existential threat, here to israel, but the media have parlayed into a threat to every non-muslim on earth that has a piece in the coalition of the willing and all. i just dunno. i think from the little i’ve read that the u.s. is largely to blame, as in arming the friends of our enemies for quick results (as in libya), and they are being armed by the ME tyrants who are our putative friends in the name of oil.
do you believe that the global caliphate will spread to millions more or something? are more being radicalized, in other words? i do admit that you press the issue so often that i’m beginning to feel a bit the same as i do when fdl commenter ‘pubic’ chastises me repeatedly for not posting on, and believing that, 9-11 was an inside job. i simply don’t know the truth of that, although studying the issue well enough to *know* would take all my energy, and then what? he maintains that it is the truth that would cause all other lies since then to unravel, and i assume he means the massive military expenditures since them, including domestically, and the aumf, tra la la. perhaps.
from earlier remarks you’ve made, i gather that you don’t believe that the bricks offer enough counter-force to the empire because a) they are capitalists, even state capitalistic, and b) at least russia has publicly dissed muslims and supports the new govt. in egypt, yes?
i’d seen the bricks and their moves to get off the petrodollar as rather serious pushback, since i see wall street as key to kill as a key revolutionary force, as in: stop the machine.
i tried to find some of the wikicables that showed that hillary clinton, et.al. knew about isis at least several years ago, but i didn’t. the hinted interpretations of that were, i’d thought, were that in the name of everlasting war, they would be another axis of evil the empire could wage war against, and…here it is.
you do seem quite more conversant with geopolitics than i am, for certain. i will say that while ideas are quite important, sadly they’re not powerful enough to change the world for the better, as evidenced by the insane amount of oppression shown the socialist nations, and that those efforts have borne only too much fruit, so that socialism isn’t spreading nearly like it should. on the contrary, in europe, the socialist parties seem to have retreated into something far different than they originally espoused.
anyhoo, i need to go do some chores; sorry i’m such a hard sale for you. ;)
oh, bother. i’d meant to ask you where you stood on r2p libya as well; your answer *could* provide me with some concept of your global vision re: muslims and self-determination.
Remember, “we” were ALL capitalists marching off to World War I; and ISIS:US is just another ‘al Sham’ in the serial PNAC Attacks on the nations on list “Clark” 7.
Sieg Hussein und Heil Hitlery!
you may be kinda/sorta in agreement with my rather wishy-washy understanding, lol. but re: wesley clark (and i was always amazed that some liberals wanted him to be prez):
Don’t Be Fooled Again Gen. Wesley Clark: War Criminal
Gen. Wesley Clark
http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/09/17/gen-wesley-clark/
peter: you may already know theirry meysann, but the folks at mosquito cloud (banned at fdl as fuckno, missling, oh dear, i’ve forgotten all his screen names, but he’s an ‘anarcho-syndicalist’, whatever that means.
http://www.voltairenet.org/auteur29.html?lang=en
R2P is just another Yankee Imperialist tool that we have no power to stop and Ferguson might be viewed as the Homeland version of that warped concept, no fly zone included.
I have plenty of time to investigate the topics that interest me while you are busy with your blog and other responsibilities so view my suggested reading as options, if you find the time. I can’t expect you to cover everything but when you do comment about the ME or other world topics I will try to explain my opinions.
I’m glad you haven’t fallen into the 9/11 nutter trap, there is a huge difference between wanting an open investigation into the failures that led to that event and the conspiracy goulash that still simmers.
When the US was basically kicked out of Iraq I think they mostly wanted to ignore the growing problems there. The Islamic State In Iraq was well established when we left so I’m sure plenty of people in the Military and Government were aware of their movements although they may not have considered them an immediate threat. Thinking that the US left the ISI intact so they could return and continue the war takes the exceptional position that we could defeat them in the first place which we couldn’t. The US had to spend millions in bribes to the Sunni Tribes just to be able to leave the country without their asses on fire.
The ISI was a small lightly armed force that successfully harried the US force of 140,000 for years, now we face a true army of heavily armed and hardened Urban Fighters itching for a rematch.
Obama and the War Department have been trying to move away from the Big War model that failed in Iraq and Afghanistan and scale down our spreading aggression with Drone War and Special Forces. I don’t think that returning to Iraq was part of anyones plan.
fair enough on your first paragraphs, and thank you. some days i feel like i’m drowning in words that bring images, then i have to weave together in new images…and back to words somehow. hegg-aches and eye prisms sometimes keep me away from the screen, as well.
i hadn’t know that IS had been such an effective small insurgent force, myself, but i think returning was definitely thought of as a distinct possibility, hence the enormous ’embassy city’ in the green zone, still, i reckon, fully staffed, including hillary’s former private military contractors: XI, blackwater. same for the ginormous city-state at bagram, allegedly given to afghanistan at least three times, lol. but you may be right that the US reckoned they could defeat them, although creating so many concrete-walled enclaves may have given them a clue. ;) and the bribes to arrg, is name: nope, can’t come up with it even seeing his face. no matter.
reason i asked about r2p libya was that kgb999, with whom i co-edited a small website, and i went toe to toe over it too many times, and it got so heated i finally left the site. but he was wedded to the idea that the arab spring and following insurgencies were cypher-punk in origin, thus he was all for it, including the weird and now disproven reports about tanks shelling benghazi, gadaffi’s soldiers being ordered to rape women ( ‘the condoms in their pockets as evidence!), and if the ‘provisional govt.’ set up by the usa happened to be full of al-qaeda or islamists, that was their choice. and of course, see libya now: full blown civil war, with hundreds of over-lapping militias, and arms from the usa and other allies who profited from gadaffi’s gold and clinton-formed central bank.
taibbi, long ago, did a stellar piece on goldman sachs and gadaffi, and i canne find it anywhere online now. now that piece did contain some satire, but: how not?
Oops, sorry, wayoutwest, my comment wasn’t in support of monarchy but as gently as I could a response to Saker’s podcast claim that ‘all Orthodox are monarchists at heart’ which I do disagree with. I gave examples from biblical and historical texts to the contrary. It’s a big disagreement I have with folk who see Orthodoxy as beginning with Emperor Constantine, when in fact all he did was create a pax Romana for the faith – no, I don’t yearn for monarchy, even though I started life as a British subject. Separation of church and state works for me.
I know you’re not fond of Greenwald these days, wendye, but he just did a really good article in collaboration with another on Libya at the Intercept. I have been hunting for news on the Mexico massacre – a dearth of substance till I got to wiki and they have a full recap, very current:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Iguala_mass_kidnapping
Somebody there really did their homework.
Sorry I can’t remember wherein I saw a claim that ISIS really smouldered into flame because of the horrors perpetrated upon Fallujah after the ‘contractors’ incident. Reading the unfolding story in Mexico gives me a similar black hole in the pit of my stomach.
there’s quite a bit online about the mexico massacre, the guardian for one, oh, i’ve forgotten where else, but mainly the titles were about the *politics* of it, as too often happens. who must resign, etc.
thanks for the tip, but i’ll pass, and not just cuz it’s greenwald, but because i’ve gotten my fill almost as far as my confirmation bias goes. i didn’t care for patrick cockburn’s piece at CP due to its ending, and had stuck this one on my current word document for finishing as i might.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/12/the-lessons-of-libya/
this diary took most of three days at my.fdl for me, and i am in need of revival on several counts. as joss would have it, i read a piece at ian welsh’s early this morning, disagreement with which sent me googling, and along the way i discovered that my most favorite ever teacher died three years ago. that led to more poking around, and found me caught up in his teachings on somatic therapy, mindfulness, nonviolence, and eastern meditations, his evolved more recent teachings, and whatnot.
i also have some new banksy and other artwork from his twit machine, and some new ‘revolutionary’ music…can’t say what the ties are exactly, but that may be where i direct my next posts. but as john lennon said, ‘life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans’. there are just so many things about to break this week, we’ll see.
I did look at the Guardian, wendye. wikipedia is much more informative.
good-o, then. and i did get suckered into reading the piece at the intercept after recalling that i may have seen a link to it that said murtaza hussain had co-authored it. so i went. quite shallow just calling out former supporters of r29, and not reallly delving into how horrid it all is there.
not to mention that the hyperlink he used to excuse juan cole who was the most ardent supporter of the ‘action’ was to a piece he wrote in 2013 saying he was just there, and everything was groovy-two-shoes. juan, of course, was often called out for being a cia asset, who can say?
but i especially loved that although hussain was given a byline, *and* i have like some things he wrote about ferguson, do note how often the first person singular was used, lololol: wonder who actually wrote it, then? plus, it did cause me to muse about gg’s denials that he ever supported the first of several wars in iraq. ;) anyhoo, i’d give it C.
http://thedailybanter.com/2012/07/glenn-greenwald-attacks-writers-for-supporting-iraq-war-when-he-did-too/
has he backtracked on his support for citizen united yet, with an ‘if i knew then what i know now’ reason? :)