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Haiti’s constitutional horror show
October 6, 2012
Update Sept. 30, 2012: For the past two weeks, massive demonstrations have rocked Haiti, protesting constitutional changes and the corruption of the Martelly government. The democratic and participatory spirit of the 1987 Constitution has been subverted by the illegitimate President Michel Martelly, who announced new amendments, which concentrate executive power and herald the return of death squad Duvalierism to Haiti.
Black president, preachers, politicians and people MIA on Black issues?
September 30, 2012
The Black community is in a world of trouble. And President Obama alone cannot fix it. This is where real leadership is needed: real, un-bought, unbiased leadership. Black America’s biggest challenge, truth be told, is itself. And Black pastors are at the center of the issue. If we can get our leaders to the table – political, business, academic and community – we could create our own salvation.
Book exposes violent role of paramilitaries in Haiti
September 7, 2012
Haiti’s brutal army was disbanded in 1995, yet armed and uniformed paramilitaries, with no government affiliation, occupy former army bases today. Join Haiti Action Committee for a discussion on the roots of paramilitarism in Haiti at La Pena Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, featuring Jeb Sprague, author of ‘Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti.’
Haiti: They don’t have bread? Give ‘em carnival
September 6, 2012
In 2012, the Maafa is a penal colony in U.S.-occupied Haiti – the national penitentiary. This image expresses a reality reminiscent of chained Africans in the hull of a slave ship bound for the Carolinas. In Haiti, prisoners without human rights are guarded by the world arbiters on human rights, the United Nations. This is how prisoners are treated. Forgotten and abandoned.
The mass incarceration of the Black community: an interview with Michelle Alexander, author of ‘The New Jim Crow’
April 4, 2012
Professor Michelle Alexander’s new book “The New Jim Crow” is a monumental, well researched piece of work that presents documented facts in down to earth English about the mass incarceration of Black people within the United States’ national concentration camp system. At one point in “The New Jim Crow,” Professor Alexander presents evidence that more Black people are enslaved behind bars today than were enslaved on the plantations in 1850, before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.
Defunding public education: an arresting development
October 12, 2010
Americans are facing the largest economic crisis since the Great Depression. States like California have responded by pulling the plug on public education. Policy makers are faint to trim any fat from the criminal justice system.
We CAN put Blacks back to work
April 28, 2010
Unemployment in the African-American community is double and in some places triple the national average. You know it doesn’t have to be that way.
The new Jim Crow: How the war on drugs gave birth to a permanent American undercaste
March 25, 2010
Among many startling findings by legal scholar Michelle Alexander, former director of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Project here in the Bay Area, is this: There are more African Americans under correctional control today – in prison or jail, on probation or parole – than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
Rwandan opposition parties condemn grenade attacks in Kigali
February 21, 2010
If Rwanda’s three viable opposition parties are allowed to register and participate in free and fair elections, they have a good chance, in coalition, of defeating Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) Party. Those three parties condemned the Feb. 19 deadly grenade attacks in Kigali, calling them “an attempt to instill fear in the population” prior to Rwanda’s August presidential election.
Pierre Labossiere on Haiti: ‘This is criminal’
January 27, 2010
Pierre Labossierre, cofounder of the Haiti Action Committee, alerts us to oppose “relief” funds and protest U.S. military occupation that threaten Haitian independence and sovereignty and to demand the return of President Aristide and the inclusion of Lavalas in Haitian democracy. Following the interview, listen and watch audio and video files featuring Pierre, Cynthia McKinney, Kiilu Nyasha, Nia Imara, Minister of Information JR, Joy Moore and more – all calling on everyone to “stand in solidarity with Haiti.”
Takeover imminent of Honduras’ Garifuna Community Hospital
September 1, 2009
Despite objections by local Garifuna communities, Honduras’ de facto government is moving to take over the first and only Garifuna-managed hospital in the country, ousting its current staff. The facility – built by Dr. Luther Castillo, other Garifuna doctors, local architects and the communities themselves – is located in the remote coastal municipality of Iriona. [The Garifuna, descended from Africans who intermarried with native Arawak and Carib people, number about 600,000 on the Caribbean coast of Central America.]
Racist, white supremacist military rule in Honduras
July 20, 2009
The racist assault on United States President Barak Obama by the Honduran military coup government, installed on June 28, 2009, was greeted by the U.S. media with what John Pilger called “contrived silence, a censorship by omission.” (Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, 7/6/09) The poisonous racist attack on the first Black U.S. president was based on racist preconceptions and was carried out by interim Honduran Foreign Minister Enrique Ortez Colindres on June 29, the day after the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya was arrested and sent into exile in his pajamas.
America’s war in Central Africa
March 28, 2009
The recent UNHCR Gimme Shelter campaign uses the iconic Rolling Stones song and Hollywood star Ben Affleck’s video of suffering in Congo as a propaganda tool to peddle the international catastrophe of Western aid, intervention, plunder and depopulation in Central Africa.