Tag: Obama

The Pentagon has ordered all its commands, bases and personnel to stop reporting statistics on COVID-19 infections and deaths in the US military, citing “operational security concerns.”

As a 16-year-old kid, given a 30-year sentence for attempted robbery, I used to think that maybe I just fell through the cracks, that I could have been saved as a kid and rehabilitated. Then I was educated, then my consciousness was raised and I realized that it wasn’t meant for me to be saved or rehabilitated.

Reid’s Records is not closed – but it needs your business and support NOW! Otherwise, the iconic and beloved Reid’s Records, one of the few Black business remaining in Berkeley, will be closing it doors Oct. 19, after 75 years of serving South Berkeley’s and the Bay Area’s Black communities since 1945!

“Follow the Money, Flashpoints Radio Voices,” an anthology of interviews from 2009-2016 KPFA Flashpoints shows, is full of tragedy: oil wars, drone bombing, torture, mass incarceration, mass surveillance, police militarization, neoliberal trade agreements, poisoned water, botched executions, ecocide and the “too-big-to-fail” bank heist that kicked off the Obama years. “Follow the Money” can at the same time serve as an organizing and networking manual, because it’s filled with the voices of those fighting back.

Two hundred delegates from African governments and institutions met in Kigali, Rwanda, yesterday for a symposium on “democratization and development.” Hailemariam Desalegn and Rwandan President Paul Kagame both spoke of the primacy of state power and African agency in development. Washington D.C.-based Ethiopian activist Obang Metho spoke to KPFA’s Ann Garrison about what was wrong with this picture.

In a blatant violation of the Congolese Constitution and of the rules and regulations governing the DRC health care system, Congolese President Joseph Kabila ordered the seizing of the bank account of Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, the hospital founded and run by Dr. Denis Mukwege. Joseph Kabila is persecuting Panzi and Dr. Mukwege in a way that no legitimate president of the citizens of a country should.

If Haiti had friends in the U.S. Congress, they would ask the Obama administration to support human rights for the U.N. cholera victims and to put an end to the fictitious elections, ever since the United States started its direct occupation of Haiti by disenfranchising 10 million Haiti voters on Feb. 29, 2004.

For decades, the Oakland Police Department has been the focus of fear. For a brief time, the Black Panther Party put a crimp into their strut. But the Black Panther Party is no more, and the repression has come surging back. The family of Alan Blueford continue to organize resistance to this campaign of repression. You can join that campaign at justice4alanblueford.org.

Ann Garrison asks, “What do you think of the first four years of the administration of Barack Obama, the first African American president?” Silvio Michel of the Green Party of Mauritius' response is typical of conversations with people on the African continent, Green or not, though there are certainly exceptions who still admire Obama’s defeat of the color bar to become this country’s highest elected official.

The images emerging from the current siege of Bani Walid are gruesome. NATO’s henchmen are attacking their own people with bombs and chemical weapons, injuring and killing scores of civilians. Women, children and old people lie maimed or dismembered on the side of the roads, many of them buried in the rubble. Ethnic cleansing of people with black skin is being carried out by Arab supremacists, but the Muslims of Bani Walid refuse to accept that people with black skin are to be hunted and killed.

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.

Judith Jamison looked regal on stage with Farai Chideya last month in The Forum Conversations at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Her message seemed to be one of preparedness and presence – being, as our sister Ayana Vanzant says, in spirit. Muslims call this the sirata-l-mustaqim or the path of the rightly guided.

“Long Distance Revolutionary,” the new documentary about political prisoner and prolific writer Mumia Abu Jamal, will have its international premiere in the Bay Area on Oct. 6 and 8 at the Mill Valley Film Festival. There have been a number of documentaries done about the case of Mumia Abu Jamal, but this one puts his life at the center of the discussion.

The NATO powers and the bureaucrats they installed in Libya want you to think that all 5.6 million Libyans are happy that NATO and its proxy terrorists destroyed Libya, a country which under Qaddafi had the highest standard of living in Africa. They want you to think that there is no Green Resistance to the NATO imperialists or NATO’s Islamist allies in Benghazi. Because of this denial, the internet is filled with blind guesses regarding the Benghazi incident Sept. 11 in which U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and at least three other American personnel were killed.

The first book I read after I decided to consciously educate myself to be a part of the movement was Sanyika Shakur’s “Monster” in the mid-‘90s. I was inspired by the sharpness of his ideas, his vocabulary and his grasp on history. I respected him in the same way I respected Tupac Shakur. I knew that one day I wanted to be able express myself as articulately as the two of them.

The Congo conflict and human catastrophe has continued despite a 2003 peace treaty. It entered a new phase with the Rwandan backed CNDP rebellion in the Kivu Provinces in April 2012. Ugandan reporter, television producer and broadcaster Paul Ndiho told KPFA that everyone knows who is doing what in Congo, but that regional and international powers are unwilling to stop it.

In the midst of the Dallas Film Society’s International Film Festival in April, Southern Methodist University hosted the 38th African Literature Association Conference that feted celebrated international film director Jean Pierre Bekolo. Inspired by Spike Lee, Bekolo says Lee “gave me the vision that I could do this thing, that I could film from the perspective of Africa.”

Today a new world order is being established in the wake of a heavy sacrifice of African lives – after the shock of thousands of deaths registered in Ivory Coast, with 1,200 inhabitants of Duékoué massacred, and dozens of thousands of casualties in Libya.

The North Atlantic tribes, under the banner of NATO, and their Arab flunkies are lining up for a showdown in Sirte. Muammar Qaddafi and the Al Fateh revolutionary forces remain defiant and have issued statements saying that they will never surrender.

Sparks flew Tuesday during the Congressional Black Caucus “For the People” jobs tour that took place in the town hall in Detroit, Mich., as Black caucus members told the mostly Black audience to “unleash” them in confronting President Barack Obama on the issue of jobs.