
When the Occupy San Quentin rally ended, San Rafael police followed us to the Richmond Bridge. I don’t know if it was Jabari Shaw’s orange CDCR jumpsuit that kept them wondering – Is he an escapee, one of ours? – or if it was the sheer magnitude of fearlessness represented by women like Kelly, a former prisoner who would not let her traumatic experience silence her. One brother got so full looking at the guards on the other side of the gate watching that he looked like he was going to leap the gate and hurt someone as he recalled the violations of his person over and over again. Members of All of Us or None dropped everything to embrace him when he left the stage.

The issue at stake is not only one of increased food insecurity, but an attack on food sovereignty or peoples’ right to produce their own food. Land grab is a violent act to take away peoples’ right to food, access to their ancestral land, their social and historical ties, and their overall right for human dignity.

The past 12 months were very intense on the African continent. Some important elections stirred up a whole lot of interests. Shared zones of influence are being renegotiated between the old powers of the world, the Western powers, and the new power, China.

The international news has been inundated with urgent appeals on the famine in the Horn of Africa. Here in the U.S. not enough attention has been paid to it. While it is critical to support and contribute to famine relief, we believe it is equally important to understand the nature and political reality of the famine and what U.S. militarism and corporate land grab have to do with it.

“Most people realize that crime is simply the result of a grossly disproportionate distribution of wealth and privilege … an aspect of class struggle from the outset. Throughout its history, the United States has used its prisons to suppress any organized efforts to challenge its legitimacy,” wrote George Jackson in “Blood in My Eye.”

In a few weeks, a group of quiet, dignified elderly men and women will arrive in London to explain how the forces of the British state crushed their testicles or breasts with pliers. It was part of a deliberate policy of breaking a civilian population who we regarded as “baboons,” “barbarians” and “terrorists.”

Libya is a small country of just over 6 million people, but it possesses the largest oil reserves in all of Africa. The oil produced there is especially coveted because of its particularly high quality. The Air Force of the United States along with Britain and France has carried out 7,459 bombing attacks since March 19. Britain, France and the United States sent special operation ground forces and commando units to direct the military operations of the so-called rebel fighters – it is a NATO-led army in the field.

Thousands of people stood in unity at the Millions March in Harlem on Malcolm X Boulevard and 110th Street in Harlem, New York, on Saturday, Aug.13, to make the demand, “U.S. / NATO HANDS OFF AFRICA AND HANDS OFF AFRICAN PEOPLE!”

Since the beginning of the seizure of police stations and army depots by the “peaceful” protesters in Libya, Africa, in February, who were then armed to the teeth and terrorized the population of many cities in Libya, the British government has supported them, calling them “rebels,” and even in the last few days recognize them as the “official government of Libya.”

For the past four years all aid agencies, including the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and U.N. relief agencies, have been blocked by the Ethiopian military from feeding starving people in Ogadenia. There are millions of starving people, maybe as many as 6 million, though no one can say for sure because no one is allowed into the region.

Powwah and his family are some of the people that I check in with when I am in the Memphis area. Besides being one of the most politically educated entrepreneurs that I know, Powwah makes music. His new album, “In tha Wind,” is Southern conscious rap at its finest with precise lyrical content and the type of production that we traditionally think of when we think of bar-b-cues and Southern Comfort.

Ethiopian troops are in the oil rich, contested Sudanese Abyei region in accordance with a new U.N. Security Council resolution invoking sovereign nations’ “responsibility to protect” vulnerable populations from genocide and mass atrocities if their own governments aren’t protecting them. But what about Ethiopia’s own genocide in the Ogaden Basin that the West is funding?

The new book by Manning Marable, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” will help us to get a deeper understanding of Malcolm X and the times we’re living in now. This will not be a direct result of what Marable has done, but rather of what needs to happen now because of what he has done.

It is with a heavy heart that I am writing this letter to appeal to you to take heed of the message that the House of Representatives sent out to Americans on June 24 by rejecting the text authorizing U.S. military intervention in Libya and ending the on-going attacks against the Libyan people with the most extravagant excuses, like the attacks are there to protect them.

First of all, let’s not get it twisted: You can be a born-again African and a born-again Christian at the same time! Being a born-again African has nothing to do with religion, other than religiously going out of your way to support Black people and Black businesses. Being a born again African means you realize that you and your people have been stripped of your land, language, culture, heritage and spirituality and you know it is your responsibility and delight to reclaim it for yourself and your kin.

A number of trees have fallen in the forest this past month and we want to acknowledge the huge spaces their absence brings: Geronimo ji jaga Pratt, Black Panther, decorated veteran of multiple wars …

“A new report claims farmers in Africa are being driven off their lands to make way for vast new industrial farming projects backed by hedge funds seeking profits and foreign countries looking for cheap food. “

Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan delivered a scathing statement on the relentless bombing of Libya by NATO forces at a press conference held at United Nations Plaza Hotel Millennium in New York City on Wednesday, June 15, 2011.

In controversy is the minister of health’s announcement of what the government of Rwanda calls voluntary vasectomies (sterilizing) of 700,000 males.

Thank you for supporting Buy Black Wednesdays. This new wave of “cooperative economics” is spreading across America and pan-Africa like a red, black and green tsunami of Black empowerment.