Tag: Republicans

Nov. 6 is election day. If you haven’t done it already, register to vote. Encourage others to register and vote. Most of your ballots will be filled with local or state issues and candidates. Voters in the United States need more choices than Democrats and Republicans. If you see the name of a Green Party candidate, I hope you will check them out. Greens believe that people and the health of the planet should be more important than corporate profit.

As we move into the next solar return, there is much to look forward to despite the stasis that seems to infect this nation with the disease of white supremacy or racial domination. OK OK, perhaps the silver lining is a bit too buried to find Osumare’s twinkle beyond any pots of gold you’ve stumbled upon recently. The knowledge that no matter how it looks, the Creator is in charge and the bad guys just look like they are always winning is what sustains us.

Give us your tired, your poor, your hungry, huddled masses ... and we’ll make sure they stay that way. That’s the message that members of Congress – Republicans and Democrats alike – are sending with their proposals to cut funding and add new restrictions for the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP – better known as the food stamp program.

The mayoral contest in Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, is now widely reported to be very close as it heads for a conclusion on Tuesday, May 21. Jackson’s population is majority Black and Democratic, so Tuesday’s Democratic primary run-off, between Black Democrat Chokwe Lumumba and Black Democrat Jonathan Lee, will effectively determine who the city’s next mayor will be.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

“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 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.

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.”