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Supreme Court hears Voting Rights Act challenge: The legal fight to protect white power
March 15, 2013
Scalia has made it clear why this case is before the Court – it’s about race and white “race entitlement.” The Voting Rights Act was passed because no group is going to “apportion themselves out of power.” If the Court rules in favor of Shelby County in the face of its racist record, it will be doing nothing more than validating white power and racism.
Mr. President, three wishes of a Black American
November 7, 2012
First, be more forceful about appointing federal judges. As a former constitutional law professor, you know better than most the importance of the federal bench. Second, please listen to Paul Krugman on economic policy. He was right early on in the economic crisis when he was adamant about the need to create jobs. Finally, do not abandon the needs of Black people because you will be seen as playing favorites. Black folks are out here on our own. We need you to stand up for us and to advance policies that will help us move upward, “lifting as we climb.”
Rock the vote! Rock the boat!
November 5, 2012
In this country they sing, “God Bless America,” but they mean, “except if you live south of the border or in the hood or if you’re a person of color, a woman, poor or an activist for the common good.” Rock the vote and rock the boat by shopping locally! My Buy Black Wednesday Business of the Month is MG Enhancez Hair Shop.
Cynthia McKinney on leadership
October 26, 2012
Recently, I had an opportunity to speak with Cynthia McKinney, and I asked her about leadership. She replied that at the local level in the Black communities, there is leadership. It no longer gets media coverage, but it is there. Real leaders are those with the courage to dissent and to resist. It is the act of resistance that transforms an elected person into a leader.
A day in the life of an imprisoned revolutionary
May 8, 2012
“The purpose of the … control unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in the society at large,” said former Marion Supermax Prison Warden Ralph Aron. What is shocking to many is how can some not only resist such systematic psychological torture, but actually improve themselves under such conditions of extreme duress.
Inside a housing takeover
July 29, 2011
For 17 hours – 4:45 p.m. Monday, July 4, until 9:45 a.m. Tuesday, July 5 – San Francisco Homes Not Jails took direct action conducting a second open housing occupation at the long-empty Mission District Sierra Hotel.
Rethinking Malcolm: What was Marable thinking?
July 8, 2011
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.
McKinney human rights fact-finders show Libyan deaths, injuries not ‘propaganda’
June 9, 2011
In the CIA kick-started war on Libya, The New York Times report Monday by John F. Burns, calling Libyan civilian casualties “propaganda,” does not square with a series of WBAIX in-hospital interviews.
Mass arrests at Capitol rotunda
June 9, 2011
Led by students and teachers noisily chanting, “Tax, tax, tax the rich!” a crowd took over the state Capitol rotunda on May 9 to kick off a week of protest against looming draconian cuts to the California education budget.
Haiti: The emperor has no votes
June 6, 2011
On April 4, the Haitian government announced that Michel Martelly won the recent fraudulent “elections” imposed on Haiti by the United States, France and Canada, the so-called “international community,” and sanctioned by the United Nations. Haiti now finds itself at a crossroads.
Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget cuts devastate the disabled, poor, sick and elderly
April 3, 2011
Oakland voters who thought they would be spared catastrophic budget cuts by voting for the Democrats and Oakland’s Jerry Brown feel abandoned and double-crossed by the latest round of budget cuts supported by Democrats.
Assemblymember Swanson calls cuts to child care ill-advised and wasteful
March 16, 2011
As the Legislature approaches an imminent vote on a budget that proposes to cut child care and developmental services by $716 million, Assemblymember Sandre Swanson, chair of the Labor and Employment Committee, discusses his strong objections.
State of the Union Address must include substantive jobs plan
January 25, 2011
On Jan. 11, 1944, in the midst of World War II and on the heels of the worst economic disaster in the history of the country, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a new “Economic Bill of Rights.” Today, 67 years later, we must push for a similar set of rights
The Hater Party
November 14, 2010
“Unemployed workers are lazy welfare queens,” said Sharon Angle, losing Senate candidate in Nevada under the Tea Party, expressing hate for families living in poverty.
The Afghanistan trap
November 1, 2009
The Afghanistan war is due for a recycling, but it may not go the way the U.S. has planned. Begun under dubious circumstances, more as a demonstration war to set the stage for the real drama of Iraq, Afghanistan has almost always been more useful as a proxy war fought by others, rather than a direct war fought by Americans.
Get off Obama’s back … second thoughts from Michael Moore
October 12, 2009
Last night my wife asked me if I thought I was a little too hard on Obama in my letter yesterday congratulating him on his Nobel Prize. “No, I don’t think so,” I replied. I thought it was important to remind him he’s now conducting the two wars he’s inherited. “Yeah,” she said, “but to tell him, ‘Now earn it!’? Give the guy a break – this is a great day for him and for all of us.”
‘What to the slave is your Fourth of July?’
July 4, 2009
This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhumane mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel in your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!
Single payer health care: big breakthroughs, interview with Rep. John Conyers
June 9, 2009
Less than a month after 13 single payer advocates were arrested protesting the exclusion of single payer, it is at the table in both Houses, making progress while the multi-payer pro-insurance reform is faltering.