The outstanding revolutionary Black journalist, the
still-imprisoned Mumia Abu-Jamal, observed, “White supremacy is the mother’s
milk of Charleston, of South Carolina, of the South, of America.” And the
twenty-one year old white man who carried out the Emanuel Church massacre clearly
worships at the altar of white supremacy. The incredibly gentle, even
considerate, manner with which the police arrested the mass murderer, including
providing him with a bullet proof vest, reflected their approach that he was
indeed one of them.
Reverend Pinkney was not only an influential Afro-American pastor
in Charleston but a highly regarded veteran state senator. Following the murder of Scott, Reverend
Pinkney had led prayer services for Scott and the community and played the key
role in the S.C. Senate, spearheading the passage of a state law requiring the
police to wear body cameras. Indeed, the entire June 17th tragedy may well have been
a South Carolina Klan/police-inspired targeted assassination of Reverend
Pinkney, covered up by a mass murder.
But more likely, the mass murder committed at historic Emanuel
Church, including against Reverend Pinkney, was a South Carolina
Klan/police-inspired or a U.S. Special Operations military attack on its whole
great history of revolt against slavery and human bondage for human freedom.
This very church, founded in 1816 in Charleston had been the organizing center
for arguably the greatest slave revolt ever planned in the history of U.S.
slavery, and was associated with Denmark Vesey, one of the Church’s founders.
In crushing that revolt, the slave-owning rulers of South Carolina had banned
all black churches in the state and burned many, including Emanuel, to the
ground. Yet this church continued to function in violation of the South
Carolina slavocracy’s laws.
In the current period,
the Mother Emanuel AME Church, has functioned as a vital part of the AME
network of churches. The AME congregations have been at the heart of the
growing struggle of the
Afro-American people
against police brutality from Trayvon Martin to Ferguson to Baltimore and
Charleston. Moreover, the AME Church helped mobilize the Afro-American farmers
who were claimants against the decades-long land stealing practices of the U.S.
Department of Agriculture which resulted in the Pigford I and Pigford II
settlements. Thus, the AME Church has been involved with the contemporary
issues concerning “Land and State Power in the Black Belt South” which is at
the heart of the Afro-American national liberation struggle.
In this setting, the U.S. Empire brought U.S. President Obama to
Charleston to provide the eulogy for Reverend Pinkney. With more than six years
as U.S. Commander in Chief, what have been Obama’s deeds with regard to the
defense of the Afro-American people?
The Afro-American people of South Carolina had provided Obama with
his first Democratic Primary victory in 2008. “In a record turnout, more than
half of the voters in the Democratic Primary were Afro-American. Eighty percent
of the Afro-American voters supported Obama [against Hillary Clinton and John
Edwards]. Yet Obama did nothing to encourage the hard pressed people of South
Carolina … Obama and his campaigners chanted ‘Race doesn’t matter!’ in the face of the obvious fact that ‘race’ had indeed mattered
there. The Afro-American people of South Carolina had demonstrated political
support for Obama in the hope that he would help alleviate their suffering.
Instead of expressing appreciation to the Black masses for the victory … Obama
and his ‘campaigners’ insulted the Black masses, deprecating their effort. As
if ashamed of their support, Obama distanced himself from the very people who
had provided his victory.” (pages 6 and 7, Ray O’Light Newsletter #47, February-March 2008) We pointed out further, “Obama has no
organic ties with any Afro-American civil rights or human rights groups or
organizations.” (ibid., page 5)
As we pointed out at the time of Obama’s first inauguration, “The
very first activity in the inauguration itself will be the invocation scheduled
to be given by Evangelical Pastor Rick Warren. By the time of the 2008
election, the only mass base of support still remaining for George W. Bush and
transferable to Senator John McCain was the white evangelical Christian right.
By selecting Pastor Warren to give the invocation, Obama is keeping the faith
with McCain and George W. Bush!
“Obama’s choice of Warren for the invocation is a repudiation of
the Afro-American church and its historical role, including its invaluable role
in the struggle for Afro-American liberation that made Obama’s election
possible. Just as Obama’s former minister and mentor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright,
has observed, the attack on him (Wright) during the election campaign was, in reality, an attack on the Black
Church,
historically the most important self-defense institution in Afro-American
society. Thus, Obama’s repudiation of Reverend Wright led inexorably to the
selection of Pastor Warren to give the invocation at the inauguration.” (page
8, Ray O’
Light Newsletter #52, January-February 2009.)
During the 2012 Presidential Election campaign, almost four years
into Obama’s presidency, we noted the following: “Barack Obama … had made his
first political run for office against incumbent Chicago
Congressman Bobby Rush, a long time civil rights activist. Obama,
when he ran for the presidency, had the benefit of the heroic and bloody and
relatively recent struggle for black voting rights that had been an integral
part of the fight of the oppressed Afro-American people for freedom. And in
2012, Obama still has the benefit of the fact that the Afro-American people
hold the vote in great reverence.
Furthermore, the election of a black president represented a breakthrough
triumph against ‘white exclusivity’ regarding the ‘cultural power’ of being
able to be the First Family, as described by Ta Nehisi-Coates.” (The Atlantic, September 2012) And,
as a still nationally oppressed people in the white supremacist USA, millions
of Afro-Americans continue to identify themselves with Obama and his family and
want him to be ‘successful.’ Tragically, this seems largely still true even
when it is at their own expense (record Black incarceration rates, joblessness,
racial profiling, home foreclosures, the firing of Shirley Sherrod by Obama’s
U.S. Department of Agriculture, the execution of Troy Davis, the killing of
Trayvon Martin, etc.) and at the expense of their brothers and sisters in
Africa (Obama’s war on Libya, the activation of the U.S. military’s Africom,
etc.).” (page 10, Ray O’ Light Newsletter #74, September-October 2012)
The epidemic of police killings of clearly innocent Black youth
during Obama’s second term has included the militarization of the domestic
police departments by the Obama government (connecting the war of terror at
home and abroad) and the use of the Justice Department under Obama and Eric
Holder to try to demobilize the increasingly frustrated and militant and growing opposition
movement to police brutality. Even more striking is the testimony of Daryl
Johnson, the senior domestic terrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS), Office of Intelligence & Analysis from August 2004 to April
2010. His 2009 Report, “Right Wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political
Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” was released and then disavowed by the Obama Regime
after it was leaked to the public. Within days, Obama’s newly appointed DHS
Secretary, Janet Napolitano, apologized for the report and Johnson’s DHS unit
was slowly disbanded over the following year, leaving behind just one analyst
to assess all non-Islamic extremist threats for DHS!! The Obama DHS, by
focusing all its anti-terrorist attention on Islamists, paved the way for the
rise of white supremacist groups inside and outside the police and military
forces of the USA. As Rania Khalek recently wrote regarding Johnson’s report:
“Obama ignored surge of right wing extremism that inspired Charleston killer.”
At the time of the 2008 presidential election, Mumia Abu-Jamal had
counseled the Afro-American people that Barack Obama was running for the
position as the head of “the most powerful white nation on earth.” It was this president, more than
six years into his job, who delivered Reverend Pinkney’s eulogy. It was a masterful
performance.
Obama declared that, “For too long, we were blind to the pain that
the Confederate flag stirred in too many of our citizens. ... We all have to
acknowledge that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial
subjugation. We see that now.” But where has Obama been on the Confederate flag
issue in the first six years of his Presidency, while the twenty-one year old
murderer and countless others have been inspired to commit atrocities against
Afro-American human beings by reverence for that Confederate flag?!
Obama even told the truth about the historical role of such white
supremacist terror as had occurred at Emanuel on June 17th. Obama
said: “It was an act that drew on the long history of bombs and arson and shots
fired at churches, not random, but as a means of control, a way to terrorize
and oppress.” Then, after receiving applause for telling that truth, Obama
flipped the script and said: “Oh, but God
works in mysterious ways. God has different ideas. He [the
murderer] didn’t know he was being used by God.” Thus, with no explanation of
why or how this time the terror wouldn’t be successful, Obama claimed that by
“Amazing Grace” it would be so. His only “proof” is that a few Southern
Republican Governors had now spoken out in favor of taking down the Confederate
flag from some official places.
Obama, following the massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church,
preached the same even more clearly bankrupt message to the oppressed that he spoke as he
took office over six years ago: “we are one.” He told the oppressed
Afro-American people that they should just wait for God’s grace. That the
murderous oppressors and the murdered oppressed are “all sinners.” And all
receive unearned grace. That’s why this time y’all should stop protesting police
brutality, stop building a movement for social and economic justice. It’s all
going to work out all right this time. Trust me, preached Obama.
What an effective stooge for U.S. imperialism!
Reverend William Barber, North Carolina NAACP President, by
contrast, pointed out that “The work of bringing down racism is not over when
we bring down only this flag … As long as we pass voter suppression laws,
unjust environmental laws, laws that underfund public education, and cause
re-segregated, high-poverty schools, laws that block Medicaid expansion and a
living wage, as long as we promote the racially applied death penalty and a
broken criminal justice system, systemic racism still exists and continues to
wave its ugly shadow over our body politic.” (“NC NAACP President Responds to
Momentum Behind Removals of Confederate Flag,” 7-4-15 News Alert)
What is to
be done to defend the
Afro-American
people today?
Beyond the vision of Reverend Barber, the fight by any means
necessary against police brutality needs to be sustained and intensified. This
needs to become part of the struggle for Black Power. Black political and
economic power needs to be organized, with the struggle for “Land and State
Power in the Black Belt South” at its core. And the struggle for Black Power
needs to be connected to the struggle for a Socialist USA and a Socialist
World, a world where economic exploitation is replaced by cooperation and
national oppression is replaced by the equality and mutual respect of all
nations and peoples. Black Lives Matter! Latino Lives Matter! Arab Lives
Matter! Workers Lives Matter! The Lives of the 99% Matter!
Workers
of the World and
Oppressed Peoples Unite!
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Greek Citizens Fight for Justice
by CARL PAPPOS
“Our lives do not
belong to the creditors!” cried Greek demonstrators in late June. (AFP) The
demonstrators were telling their government and the world that they want no
part of the austerity measures the IMF is trying to force on Greece. In simple
terms they are saying if you foreclose on our house (Greece) we are staying
right here. With the Greek government refusing the latest IMF offer, on June
29, 2015 the Dow Jones Industrial average lost about 2% or 350 points
responding to this demand of the citizens of Greece.
What is going on here! Are the citizens of Greece setting
themselves up for an economic disaster?
No! Just the opposite. Since 2010 Greece has been in a battle with
the big banks, Ã la International Monetary Fund(IMF) who want their money on
the backs of the Greek people. Just like the infamous U.S. bank, insurance, and
corporate bailout that took place on our backs, the 99%, here in the U.S.
With unemployment around 25% and the IMF asking the Greek
government to cut pensions and other social services, the people by the 10’s of
thousands are saying, NO!
The Guardian reports:
“Rallying in front of
the Greek parliament on Monday night, supporters of the Syriza-led government
of prime minister Alexis Tsipras demanded an end to the ‘economic asphyxia’ and
‘social catastrophe’ of austerity – and the return of dignity.”
“Today, in Syntagma,
thousands of citizens responded to the ultimatums [made by creditors],” the
statement said.
“People said a big
and resounding ‘no’ to blackmail, terrorisation, threats internally and
externally, and a big ‘yes’ to democracy, dignity, popular sovereignty, values
that are the foundation of modern European civilisation.”
And further;
“‘The people of
Greece have made many sacrifices. What interests me is not the euro but
guaranteeing a dignified way of life for the next generations,’ 50-year-old
Vanguelis Tseres, who has been unemployed since the start of the debt crisis in
2010, told AFP in Syntagma square in the capital.”
With the Greek people resisting the theft of all this easy money,
the world’s largest gambling casino of the rich, the stock markets, are way
down.
This scenario happens here in the U.S. many times in response to
good job growth and low unemployment.
Capitalism works on supply and demand, in opposition to socialism that
works for the needs of the people. So
high employment is good for the workers and means higher wages and benefits and
consequently lower profits for the rich.
While high unemployment results in cheap labor as workers compete to
find a job and survive. This is what
internationally celebrated Afro-American writer, radio journalist and
revolutionary activist Mumia Abu-Jamal is speaking of when he says the
following in an interview: “… recently we heard about a bump on the Dow Jones
average … people who are traders on Wall Street went into a fit because it was
announced that something like 750,000 new jobs (were created) … that harms my
stock average … there is something wrong then when people get jobs, it is bad
news. … It’s very clear whose interests are reflected on Wall Street and whose
interests are reflected on Main Street.”
U.S. workers need to unite with and support Greek workers and
raise our own demands against the continued degradation and loss of our
pensions, health care, wages, schools, etc. The rich get rich not by their hard work but by
stealing the fruits of our hard work.
Victory to
the Greek Workers and People!
Let’s
Follow their Example —
Fight for Worker’s Democracy and Socialism in the USA!
******************************************************************
2015 GE
Contract Negotiations
Race to the Bottom Gets More Fuel
by PAT KELLY
In late June a tentative agreement was reached between top company
and union negotiators which affects workers at GE unionized plants. This
agreement was a sellout, union busting deal that destroyed some of the most
treasured benefits GE workers have gained over decades of class struggle.
Let’s start with retirees. This agreement cuts post 65 medical and
prescription coverage for those retiring in January of next year, and leaves
the door open to do the same to all retirees — those who are the most needy and
live on fixed incomes; how disgusting and heartless. It should be said that GE
Company is a global corporate juggernaut that made 16 billion dollars in profit
last year. With such immense wealth GE can well afford retiree benefits.
Next is the attack on weekly payroll contributions for health
care. The employee cost will increase by 46% over 4 years. Other concessions
include a reduction in life insurance benefits and big increases in out of
pocket cost for specialty drugs.
There were slight improvements particularly to pension benefits.
But this was done to divide the older from younger workers. The wage package
was another big attack. The union standard was percentage wage increases and
C.O.L.A.’s (cost of living adjustment) based on the consumer price index (CPI)
to protect workers’ pay against inflation. The new pro company offer replaced
this with flat cents per hour wage and “COLA” increases, not connected to the
CPI.
A proposal that is devastating for the union is the cynical
“Ratification Bonus,” known as the “Rat Clause.” In locals that vote to accept
the contract offer, members receive a $2,000 “bonus.” Individuals in locals
that vote to reject the offer would not receive the bonus! What an insult! What
a slap in the face, bribery as a contract offer. What a clever way to get union
workers to pressure their union brothers and sisters to surrender their
dignity! In Local 201, the Lynn, Massachusetts local, it is even more
insidious. In the previous contract vote, Local 201, with its militant history
dating back to the 1930’s CIO, had been the only major GE local that rejected
the contract. This time, with the presence of the “Rat Clause,” if Local 201
members had again been the only major local to reject the contract, and the
contract was ratified, each individual 201 member would have been out $2,000
dollars, without altering the outcome for all the GE workers!
Predictably, corrupt national union leaders who have no respect
for themselves and even less respect for workers, did not seriously demand that
the “Rat Clause” be removed. The top negotiating bodies led by the
International Union of Electrical Workers* President Jim Clark voted
unanimously to recommend acceptance. GE workers after being sold out, betrayed,
and set up by their national leaders and most local leaders, and with a lack of
resistance within their own ranks voted nationally to accept GE’s rotten offer
by 83.5%.
The 16.5% who voted NO is a core group within the union to help build a fight against GE
Company and to vote out pro company elements and rebuild a stronger union. Like
one GE worker said “With a vote like that GE is going to think that they gave
us too much.”
GE Company stands
exposed as a ruthless, cold blooded, profit mad tyrant, with no sense of human
decency or morality. That’s an important lesson to learn on the long road to
justice and worker’s power.
We have nothing to
lose but our chains.
*IUE is now a Division
of the Communication Workers of America.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
STILL STUMPED?
SEE BELOW FOR ANSWER TO MYSTERY QUOTE FROM TOP
102-year-old Ingeborg Rapoport
was
scheduled to receive a doctoral degree from the University of Hamburg’s medical
school this June 9th. According to a detailed Wall Street
Journal article, “by all available evidence [she would become] the oldest
person to receive a doctoral degree.” (“Reversing a Nazi Ban, at Age 102,” WSJ, May 15, 2015) Her modest statement underscored the fact
that she had been deprived of that degree for seventy-seven years!
 |
| INGEBORG |
In 1938, at the same
university, 25 year old Ingeborg Sylim had presented her doctoral thesis on
diphtheria, then a leading cause of childhood deaths in both Europe and the
USA. However, the fact that her mother was Jewish rendered Ingeborg a “first
degree crossbreed” under the Nazi Regime. On this basis she was blocked from
taking the oral examination and was ineligible for academic advancement. “The
Berlin authorities cited ‘racial reasons’ for the ban,” as the WSJ article points out.
“Her treatment was hardly unique: Thousands of ‘non-Aryan’ students and
professors were pushed out of universities in Hitler’s Third Reich, and many
died in death camps.” (ibid.)
Ingeborg soon emigrated to the
USA, penniless and alone, but “had great luck — and perhaps some tenacity,” as
she again modestly put it. She applied to 48 medical schools in the USA and was
accepted by just one. (Was this a reflection of widespread U.S. anti-Semitism?)
At a Cincinnati hospital in her first job as an M.D. in 1944, she met and
married Austrian-Jewish physician and biochemist, Samuel Rapoport. The couple
flourished. Samuel received a Certificate of Merit from President Harry Truman
for his work on blood conservation and Ingeborg rose quickly to head the
hospital’s pediatric polyclinic. They also had three children and a fourth on
the way by 1950.
At that point, Samuel stayed in
Zurich after a professional conference and was joined in Europe by Ingaborg and
the children. Evidently, feeling the heat from the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC), especially given their sympathies with the persecuted U.S. Communist
Party, and no doubt, being able to detect the stench of fascism with the rising
McCarthyism in the USA, the Rapoport family migrated to East Germany. There,
according to the WSJ article, “Mr. Rapoport got his own biochemical institute … [and]
Ms. Rapoport founded the first neonatology clinic in either Germany* … and
their children flourished.”
Still, even with her optimistic
outlook on her life, Ingeborg Rapoport continued to feel that she had been
wronged with regard to her Doctorate Degree in Nazi Germany. She did not want
an honorary degree but the real doctorate that had been denied her. Recently,
with the aid of her Harvard Medical School Professor son Tom, and his
connections in the University of Hamburg, they arranged with the current dean of
the University of Hamburg’s medical faculty for her to have a legal pathway to
her doctorate. She then took her oral exams after studying up on the past seven
decades of diphtheria scientific advances. And this led to her world record
accomplishment.
—the Editor
P.S. One lesson of this story about
the Rapoport Family and its escape from the USA, during
the anti-communist
hysteria of the 1950’s, is what a loss for this society the leave-taking of
such marvelous people was for those of us who remain here still and for those
who have had to confront the U.S. Empire everywhere.
_____________________
*Given the importance of
neo-natal care for new infants and their mothers, it is noteworthy that the
so-called “backward” but socialist East Germany had a clinic
devoted to this important healthcare area before the heavily
U.S.-subsidized “advanced” but capitalist West Germany.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
A Song of Freedom
“Lift Ev’ry
Voice” versus “Amazing Grace”
by ROSE BROWN
On Friday, June 26, 2015, Clementa Pinckney, South Carolina State
Senator and Reverend of the Charleston, South Carolina Mother Emanuel AME
Church, was laid to rest. He was one of the victims of the right-wing terrorist
murder by a young white supremacist of nine innocent Afro-American parishioners
who had gathered for Bible Study the previous Wednesday evening, June 17.
President Barack Obama, the first African-American President of the USA,
presented the eulogy at Senator Pinckney’s funeral service. The anchor of
President Obama’s eulogy was the popular church hymn “Amazing Grace.”
“Amazing Grace” was written by former eighteenth century British
slave trader, John Newton. When Newton wrote “Amazing Grace,” a significant
part of what he was writing about was his work as a slave trader which he had
taken up in his father’s footsteps but abandoned later in life when he became
an Abolitionist. By almost any moral or religious standard in the twenty-first
century, Newton had been a terrible sinner against his fellow humankind, a
“wretch” who “once was lost but now” was “found,” “Was blind, but now” could
“see.”
How could Obama compare the oppressed Afro-American masses whose
church had just been violated, who had been brutally victimized once again, to
this former slave trader? Because Obama serves the interests of the Wall Street
rich. He is the leader of the number one terrorist country of the world. It
serves U.S. imperialism to bury the fundamental distinction between the
oppressed and the oppressors of the world, a distinction which Russian
revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin referred to as “the essence of
imperialism.”
Obama’s eulogy, his repeated references to the “grace of God” and
his leading in the singing of “Amazing Grace” equate the murderer and the
centuries of oppressors of the Afro-American masses with the oppressed masses themselves who have suffered
mightily, and have stood up against, opposed, and resisted such oppression. The
message of Obama’s eulogy to the Afro-American masses and to all freedom loving
people is to wait on (pray for) the “grace” of God, to unite with our enemies
and to “forgive and forget” the outrages committed against us. In spite of his
long overdue support for the demand to take down the Confederate flag of
slavery, Obama’s basic message is to support the status quo.
Let’s contrast the words and message of “Amazing Grace” with
another religious anthem, widely considered the Afro-American national anthem,
“Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” was written by James
Weldon Johnson, a novelist and poet, a diplomat and teacher, and the first
Black executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) at the beginning of the twentieth century. This anthem which was
set to music by his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, calls on the Afro-American
masses to “march on till victory is won.” While referring to the strength of
the “faith” that the “dark past has taught us” and “hope that the present has
brought us,” there is
no call for forgiveness of the enemies of the people. There is no call for
unity with them. The anthem is a clear call for unity of the Afro-American
masses (Lift every voice) in the
struggle for “Liberty.” It is a religious song that calls on the Afro-American
people to stand “True to our God” but the God portrayed by Johnson, in contrast
to that of Newton, is a God of the “rising sun of our new day” of liberty for
those who have been oppressed.
Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing
by James Weldon
Johnson
Lift ev’ry voice
and sing,
Till earth and
heaven ring,
Ring with the
harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing
rise
High as the
list’ning skies,
Let it resound loud
as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of
the faith that the dark past has taught us;
Sing a song full of
the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising
sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is
won.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Greetings —
to the Million People’s March Against Police
Brutality,
Racial Injustice and Economic Inequality!
by RAY LIGHT
On behalf of the Revolutionary Organization of Labor, USA, an
endorser of the March, I congratulate those of you who are present today to
oppose police brutality and the whole state apparatus of United States
imperialism. The People’s Organization for Progress (POP) has earned its
sponsorship of this important protest. It is an organization whose long history
of struggle against police brutality in the NY-NJ area places it in a good
position to try to galvanize the mass motion that arose in Ferguson, MO and has
reached its zenith thus far in Baltimore, MD.
Today, as the world capitalist economic crisis is hastening the
end of U.S. imperialist hegemony, the U.S. Empire in decline is attempting to
use state terror to keep the working class and oppressed peoples within the U.S.
multinational state, and especially the Afro-American people, as well as the
working people of the rest of the world, in a position of bondage so that Wall
Street and finance capital can continue to reap super-profits at our expense
and resist the challenges to its hegemony from China, the European Union, etc.
Increasingly, the same terror that the Bush and Obama Regimes have
inflicted on the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa is being meted out
to us. It is the U.S. Empire’s war at home that is the companion to the U.S.
Empire’s war abroad. Black Lives Matter, Latino Lives Matter, Arab Lives
Matter, Workers’ lives matter, the lives of the 99% matter! And no mere
dialogue with the local police department can alter the systemic violence which
these armed servants of Wall Street, of big business, of those “too big to
fail” inflict upon us. It is their very reason for being.
The growth of the police state terror in the USA is connected to
the political-economy of U.S. imperialism.
Recognition of this fact will provide us with the necessary allies among
the international working class and the oppressed peoples, and even temporary
allies among other classes and countries, with which we can meet and defeat
U.S. imperialism.
Workers of the World and
Oppressed Peoples Unite!
* * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * *
