World News & Views

The 9,000 U.N. troops in Haiti are paid over $601.58 million per year and have been in Haiti for four years. That is $50.13 million per month, $1.64 million per day. Yet, during the recent floods and hurricane season in Haiti, the Haitian president had to call for international help from the international community. Wasn’t that help already in Haiti, to the tune of 9,000 U.N. – MINUSTAH – troops already cashing in $1.64 million per day?

America’s infant mortality rate is the highest of all industrial countries. It is no secret that a Black baby born in America has more than a two fold greater chance than a white baby of dying before its first birthday. No secret and actually a national disgrace that a baby born in the much-lambasted tiny poor communist island of Cuba has a better chance of having a healthy infancy than a Black baby born in America.

On July 29 the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn hosted a standing-room-only report-back meeting led by several participants in the historic Viva Palestina U.S. convoy who returned July 17 and 18 from Gaza City in Palestine. The audience was majority Black.

"We applaud your focus on the horrors of the conflict in the Congo by addressing sexual and gender based violence; however, such violence against women is a direct result of the resource war. The United States can play a key role in bringing an end to the conflict," Friends of the Congo wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Black August is a month of great significance for Africans throughout the Diaspora, but particularly here in the U.S. where it originated. “August,” as Mumia Abu-Jamal noted, “is a month of meaning, of repression and radical resistance, of injustice and divine justice; of repression and righteous rebellion; of individual and collective efforts to free the slaves and break the chains that bind us.”

The young man who appears to have been gunned down by U.N. occupation troops after a funeral last month received an all but secret funeral himself on July 14 in Port-au-Prince because the priest and family were fearful of U.N. and Haitian government reprisals.

California’s phony bleeding heart liberal Democrats have just helped to pass a Republican budget deal that shreds California’s safety net by cutting $15.5 billion from the state’s service sector to partially close a $26.3 billion funding shortfall in state revenues. The Democrats supported a $1.3 billion cut to MediCal, a $2.8 billion cut to the statewide university system, and a $6 billion cut to California’s K-12 schools. The Democratic leadership also supported the Republicans’ push to slash the children’s health insurance program known as Healthy Families, as well as In-Home Supportive Services and the CalWORKs program by cutting $878 million or more in coming months.

Black British filmmaker Ishmahil Blagrove was aboard Free Gaza's Spirit of Humanity, abducted by the Israeli Navy and, like Cynthia McKinney, one of the Free Gaza 21 imprisoned in an Israeli jail. He reports: "The prison population in Israel is 90 percent Black, which is why I was so welcomed by fellow inmates. There are thousands upon thousands of Africans inside the Israeli prisons."

Cynthia McKinney, the outspoken former congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate, recently got out of jail. Yeah. That’s right. Jail. It’s possible that you had no idea she was in jail. That’s because she was in detention for almost a week in Israel.

Currently, the country of Honduras in Central America is experiencing its worst political crisis in decades. In the aftermath of the military coup that forcibly removed President Manuel Zelaya Rosales, there have been various developments that have raised our concern about the security of citizens’rights and the impact of the situation on people of African descent.

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.

Jubilant at finally breaking the blockade to bring aid to the people of Gaza, three Black heroes - former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, fresh out of an Israeli prison, New York City Councilman Charles Barron and M-1 of dead prez - and Viva Palestina organizer British Member of Parliament George Galloway's are interviewed by the world press. Yet U.S. media are silent. Read all about it right here.

Recently Cynthia McKinney has been traveling to Gaza on human rights missions challenging the illegal Israeli military blockade. She, along with a number of others who were bringing humanitarian aid to the area, were confronted by the Israeli military on two occasions. The first time the Israelis rammed their ship and nearly sank it. The second time, People’s Advocate Cynthia and the rest of the Free Gaza 21 had their boat commandeered and were kidnapped by the Israelis and taken to prison. Check out the People’s Advocate in her own words.

Our country desperately needs politicians like Cynthia McKinney – those who speak truth to power. Her words and actions mark her out as a prime target for those whose main interest is in maintaining the status quo. It makes me sad and angry to hear Cynthia McKinney accused of bigotry. It’s bad enough to hear right wingers do that – that’s to be expected. But to hear charges like that spread on progressive websites is depressing.

Upon her release and return, Cynthia McKinney spoke to WBAIX-New York from New York’s JFK Airport, where she reported that the Israeli Navy had towed the “Spirit of Humanity,” not directly to Port Ashdod but on a circuitous route, bypassing the Gaza Coast. This, she said, suggested that the Israeli Navy is engaged in activity that they do not want observed off the Gaza Strip, known to be the site of billions of dollars worth of natural gas reserves.

On the 30th of June 2009, in international waters, 60 miles off the coast of Israel, Israeli Naval gunships surrounded the Free Gaza movement boat, "Spirit of Humanity," which was carrying 21 activists from 11 countries, including former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Maguire and a cargo of medical aid, toys and building supplies for the besieged people of Gaza.

We don’t have to look all the way back to slavery, colonialism or the overthrow of democrats like Lumumba. Even today, U.S. corporations act with impunity in many countries of the continent because the governments are too impotent to stop them. Bono, in writing about Obama’s message to Africa, said: “Corruption stalks Africa’s reformers. ‘If you fight corruption, it fights you back,’ a former Nigerian anti-corruption official said.” Well, this is very true, but we cannot ignore the fact that behind the corruption, it is too often an American policy or corporation pulling the strings.

Minister of Information JR caught up with former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, the Green Party’s 2008 presidential candidate, upon her return to the U.S. from a week’s incarceration in an Israeli jail. She and the Free Gaza 21 – the crew and passengers, including political leaders, human rights workers, Nobel Peace laureate Mairead Maguire among them, and journalists, of the boat “Spirit of Humanity” – had been boarded, assaulted and kidnapped while sailing in international waters by a fleet of Israeli warships.

Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim are both well aware that there is no justice in the U.S. courts for us – there’s just us, as we used to say. Jalil did a great job of making sure all four co-defendants would have their charges dropped before making this decision that I know he did not want to make.

The world saw Israel’s despicable violence, thanks to al-Jazeera Arabic and Press TV that broadcast in English. I saw those broadcasts live and around the clock, not from the USA but from Lebanon, where my first attempt to get into Gaza had ended because the Israeli military rammed the boat I was on in international waters … It’s a miracle that I’m even here to write about my second encounter with the Israeli military, again a humanitarian mission aborted by the Israeli military.